Mike Lynch Cartoons: From the Dick Buchanan Files: Boris Drucker Gag Cartoons 1946

Above: wartime drawings from Boris Drucker's WWII sketchbook. Part of a gallery show at Syracuse University (More images are reproduced in Johanna Drucker's book about her father. Link below.)

Boris Drucker (1920 - 2009) was one of those post-war cartoonists whose work you saw pretty much every week, maybe a couple of times a week, in all of the major magazines of the day. But it was almost a fluke that he became a cartoonist. That wasn't what he went to art school for. Dick Buchanan has the story and twenty great Boris Drucker gag cartoons for your edification. Thanks, and take it away, Dick!

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BORIS DRUCKER
Gag Cartoons 1946 – 1955

Boris Drucker was a cartoonist who also enjoyed an illustrious career as an advertising artist and instructor. He was born and lived most of his life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After he graduated West Philadelphia High School in 1938, Drucker attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts.

During World War II, he served in the Army in the China-Burma-India Theater. He completed meteorological reports for U.S. pilots flying over the Himalayas, and found time to sketch villagers and his fellow soldiers during his tour.

Drucker got his start in magazine cartooning in 1946, when he came back from overseas and was interviewing for an advertising job. There, an executive advised him that he was a cartoonist, not an advertising artist, and suggested he try the Saturday Evening Post. So, Drucker took the next month to draw 100 cartoons, and, with the help from his family, friends and neighborhood postman, chose 10 to submit to the Post. The cartoon editor bought one of them and Drucker quickly became a frequent contributor to the Post, Collier’s and many other national magazines.

At art school Drucker had been on the advertising art track and he continued to pursue work in that field. From the late 1940s until the middle of the 1960s, he was a commercial artist for corporate clients in advertising and industry, winning awards for his Bell Telephone’s “Call By Number” campaign in the 1950s.

In 1966, after a brief stint of teaching advertising and commercial art, Drucker moved to New York to open a studio and at the age of forty-six was accepted as a New Yorker cartoonist. He continued as a contributor for the next 30 years.

Boris Drucker’s daughter, Johanna Drucker, complied a fine collection of Drucker’s work, including his wartime drawings, "Don't Pay Any Attention To Him, He's 90% Water: The Cartooning Career of Boris Drucker" published by the University of Syracuse Press, 2005.

1. BORIS DRUCKER. The Saturday Evening Post, December 14, 1946.