Jack Davis, along with Will Elder and Wally Wood, formed a triumvirate of great comics artists who worked with demented genius comic writer Harvey Kurtzman to create some of the funniest and best drawn humor comics ever created, the Mad comic books from the middle of the last century.

If you have never seen reprints of the Mad comics from the ’50s and your picture of Mad is from the current day magazine, you have no idea what you’re missing. In reaching for a comparison I was tempted to say that it’s like comparing the warmed over yogurt of the past decade’s Saturday Night Live shows to the comic brilliance of that show’s hilarious and ground breaking first three seasons, but a more apt comparison might be the unmatched comic genius of Ernie Kovacs, whose surreal and incredibly imaginative skit comedy established a standard for television comedy that has never been matched.

Similarly, the genius of the original mad comics has never been matched, although it has been the inspiration for subsequent generations of irreverent, “thumbed nose in the face of society” comics like the underground comix of the sixties, independents of the ’80s and many of the more adventurous web comics of the 90’s and beyond.

Davis, although not possessed of Wood’s level of draftsmanship or Elder’s manic sense of comic detail and command of facial expression, was the one who stretched the limits of comic drawing to a previously unknown degree. His outlandishly loopy characters, drawn with a flurry of energetic lines, projected an incredible sense of comic movement and riotous glee in their impossible contortions.

In addition to his terrific Mad work, which kept up into the comic’s transition into a black and white magazine (the first few years of which maintained a high level of the original quality), Davis worked with Kurtzman subsequently in his other humor magazines, Help, Trump and Humbug and assisted Kurtzman and Elder on Playboy’s Little Annie Fannie (see my post on Elder). Davis became known for his wonderfully fun portrayals of monsters and did work for all of E.C’s horror comics, as well as humorous monsters for posters and trading cards. There is a web archive of his monster trading card series You’ll Die Laughing.

Davis also did work for Mad imitators like Cracked, Crazy and Panic, as well as creating artwork (usually with caricatures) for movie posters and magazines like TV Guide, Time and Esquire as well as a roster of advertising clients.

Davis received the National Cartoonist’s Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, their Ruben Award for Best Cartoonist of the Year in 2000, and was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame (The Eisner Award) in 2003 and The Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2005.

Art of Jack Davis is out of print, but you can still find it used. You can also find his horror comics work in reprints of the EC Comics like The EC Archives: Shock Suspenstories Volume 1 (and similar titles) and his wonderful Mad stuff in Mad About the Fifties, along with brilliant work by Wood and Elder.

In spite of a personal schedule that I thought would prevent it, I managed to catch Scott McCloud’s lecture at Drexel University here in Philadelphia last night.

McCloud, for those of you not familiar with him, is a popular comics creator and writer, who is best known as a writer about comics, not in the sense of a reviewer, but in the overarching sense of one who tackles the philosophical questions of what comics actually are, what they can do and how they work as an art form and means of visual communication.

He’s also a comics creator, see my previous post about the online version of his long running character Zot!. You can also find some of his comics stories and experiments on his site.

This year McCloud released the third of his major books about the comics form. The first one, Understanding Comics, is a classic on the nature of comics as a medium and art form, and I can’t recommend it highly enough (certainly not in this short space). The second was Reinventing Comics, about the new forms comics are taking, particularly in electronic media, (in which he mentions my own webcomic, Argon Zark!). The new book is Making Comics, his foray into the art and craft of comics, about which I will write a more detailed post in the near future.

In support of the new book McCloud and his family have embarked on a 50 state lecture tour, with speaking engagements at universities, comics conventions, large comics shops and other venues across the country. Interestingly, in an interview on Marty Moss-Coane’s Radio Times yesterday on the local NPR affiliate WHYY (Real Audio file available by searching for Nov 30, 2006 on this page), McCloud says that when he is booked by a university, he’s never sure what department will be hosting him. It could be the art department, communications or technology. His lectures and writings are of interest to all of them.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Scott before, so I knew he was well spoken and articulate, but I was pleased to find that he is also a very good public speaker. His presentation was lively, witty, accompanied by well thought out and arranged graphics (as you might imagine), and in retrospect, covered a remarkable amount of ground in under an hour. He also tackled some fairly advanced concepts and made them seem simple and understandable with his usual aplomb, bringing to bear his uncanny understanding of the relationship between words and pictures in sequence (comics), and the power of that form to not only tell stories, but convey information, even complex information.

In all, this is a very worthwhile experience for anyone interested in visual art or communications of any sort, and if you are in the path of his lecture tour, I highly recommend that you try to catch his presentation. As far as I know the lectures are usually free and open to the public, particularly when sponsored by universities.

You can find the schedule on the Tour section of his site, as well as “along the way” details on a blog devoted to the tour, which also include tibits like “Winterviews“, videos in which McCloud’s young daughter interviews comics creators they encounter in their travels.

McCloud has also recently posted an online supplement to one of the chapters of the new book, called “Chapter 5½“, in which he adds to the “Tools, Techniques and Technology” chapter with information on computer technology displayed in its natural environment.