Dave Berg, a mainstay of MAD Magazine since 1957, passed away last night following several months of severe illness. His series, "The Lighter Side of…" debuted in the magazine in 1961 and immediately became popular enough to appear in every issue, as long as Dave's health allowed him to produce it. That meant every issue, up until just a few years ago. It made him famous, but it was by no means all he did in comics. Dave was born in Brooklyn in 1920, the son of a bookbinder who had once studied to become a rabbi. A smidgen of each area seems have been passed on to young David. He later "made" (i.e., wrote and drew) books and approached most of his work with a devout, almost Rabbinical sense of morality. He even took to lecturing — first, his colleagues and then students on college campuses — about the Talmud.
A child prodigy, Berg won art scholarships when just a boy and got into comic books about the time comic books began appearing. His earliest efforts were for Will Eisner's studio. Eisner hired him to ink backgrounds and, within weeks, Berg was writing and drawing his own stories. One — Death Patrol — drew great praise, including a fan letter from a kid named Wally Wood. Later, when folks were calling Wood one of the great comic artists, he would cite that strip and Berg's work as a major influence.
Working at Eisner's, Berg became friendly with other artists, including young Al Jaffee, who introduced him to a circle that included Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder and others who (along with Wood) would later form the nucleus of MAD. Dave worked in other comics, including a long stint on the original Captain Marvel and a mess of Archie knock-offs for Stan Lee's outfit, which would later be known as Marvel. In 1956, when recession hit the comic field, Berg tried to get work with Kurtzman, who had left MAD to start a new humor magazine called Trump. Kurtzman told Berg he didn't need his services but suggested that MAD might. MAD did.
Thereafter, Dave Berg appeared in over 360 issues of MAD and also wrote and drew around a dozen paperback books. His strips featured "slice of life" jokes, many of them culled from interviewing friends and family, getting their true-life experiences on the current topic. As a result, his work was filled with caricatures of his friends and family, with Berg himself constantly appearing as a character named Roger Kaputnik. Some found his work corny; others deemed it filled with clever insight. Whichever, it was clearly popular with MAD readers for a very long time and we'll miss both Dave Berg and Mr. Kaputnik.