Longtime MAD magazine writer Frank Jacobs passed away this morning at the age of 91. When Harvey Kurtzman stepped down as editor of MAD and was replaced by Al Feldstein, Frank was the first writer Feldstein bought material from and over the years, he and subsequent editors bought a lot of it from Frank.
That first piece of his for MAD appeared in #33, cover-dated June of 1957. He had work in 312 issues, making him the seventh most-prolific contributor to the magazine ever. (Beating him out: Jaffee, Aragonés, DeBartolo, Drucker, Coker and Berg.) Frank's last new work seems to have been in #529, cover-dated October of 2014. Work of his is reprinted in almost every issue of the last few years.
I thought he was not only the best writer of humorous verse and parody lyrics in MAD but in the whole world of comedy writing. He never got the recognition he deserved for all that brilliant work and that was one reason I was proud to present him with the Bill Finger Award at Comic-Con International in 2009. Another was that I really liked Frank. I learned a lot from him and I laughed a lot because of him — as did anyone who read more than a few issues of that magazine.