Mort Gerberg and The Big 9-0 (and 6-0)
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Mort Gerberg is celebrating a 90th birthday, born March 11, 1931 (yeah, we’re a day late). Also this year he will be celebrating his 60th year as a cartoonist.
In Mort Gerberg On the Scene Mort explains the he did cartoon for his high school newspaper but put that aside for the Army and a mainstream job as a newspaper reporter and in magazine advertising sales. At age thirty he began his freelance cartooning career. His first sale was to Paul Krassner’s The Realist, and that was a full page of cartoons with Mort’s name emblazoned as the creator of them. The page appeared in the December 1961 issue … and a cartoonist was born.
© Paul Krassner/Mort Gerberg
The magazines Mort has sold to are 1000 Jokes, Swank, Dude, Gent, Cavalier and Diners Club Magazine. Then came Saturday Evening Post, Look, Saturday Review, Esquire, Life, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Harvard Business Review, among others.
© the respective copyright holder
Mort’s first published cartoon for The New Yorker was in the April 10, 1965 issue (below).
© Condé Nast
A Michael Maslin Fun Fact from December 2020 –
Here’s a list of the magazine’s top five longest active contributing artists
Edward Koren (May 26, 1962)
Mort Gerberg (April 10, 1965)
Edward Frascino (September 4, 1965)
George Booth (June 14, 1969)
Sam Gross (August 23, 1969)
Mort got into the daily grind of syndicated newspaper comics in the 1980s.
The September 10, 1979 Koky debut showed up a couple months later in
The Sydney Morning Herald (above). © Chicago Tribune - N. Y. News
From 1979 to 1981 Mort drew the Koky comic strip. Mort also drew the There Oughta Be A Law feature from 1984 to 1985. In between those two endeavors he partnered with Jack Anderson and Ted Enik on Capital Hills, an effort that signed with a syndicate but never made it into newspapers.
© United Feature Syndicate
Mort never stopped being a successful magazine cartoonist and cartoon instructor.
Mike Lynch and Dick Buchanan show Mort cartoons and photos from various sources,
while Michael Maslin has New Yorker cartoons and events by and about Mort.
Wikipedia has a nice profile of Mort and Amazon has his always enjoyable books.
Check in with Mort at his website and at his Twitter feed.
© Condé Nast
Belated (sorry), but sincere, birthday wishes to Mort!
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