Word has reached us of the passing of cartoonist Paul Peter Porges on December 20 at the age of 89. Porges was a frequent contributor to the top magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's and Saturday Evening Post but if you know his name, it's probably because of his work for MAD starting in 1966 and continuing just barely into the twenty-first century. He usually wrote but sometimes drew and sometimes did both.
He had a fascinating life. He was born in Vienna and spent much of his adolescence moving about Europe, trying to avoid imprisonment by the Nazis. Captured once, he managed to escape but his parents were not so fortunate and spent time in a concentration camp before being freed and, like him, emigrating to the United States. In 1950, he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.
He had been an artist before that — "mostly paintings to be hung on walls," he told me the one time we spoke. But in the army, he was asked to draw cartoons for the camp newspaper and that set him off on the career he would follow for the rest of his days. It was a friend — MAD's longtime art director John Putnam — who invited Porges into The Usual Gang of Idiots.
The last twenty years or so, if you asked him who he was drawing for, he said, "Myself." He stopped working on assignments (with the occasional exception) and drew as he pleased. If someone wanted to buy some of his output and publish it, fine. But as he put it, "If they don't, that's fine too."
His friends at MAD describe him as "a warm and gregarious man," one who was exceptionally devoted to his wife, Lucie. Lucie preceded him in death and that's the two of them dancing in the above photo. I only knew him through a phone interview for my book MAD Art but he was sure funny on the phone. Oh, yeah — and on paper, too.