With his satirical illustrations for National Lampoon and The New Yorker, Bruce McCall conjures up a plutocratic dream world of luxury Zeppelin trips, indoor golf courses and cars like the Bulgemobile Airdream, and on Friday Died in the Bronx. He was 87 years old.
His wife, Polly McCall, said his death at Calvary Hospital was due to Parkinson’s disease.
Borrowing an advertising style seen in magazines such as Life, Look and Collier’s in the 1930s and 40s, McCall painted a bright fantasyland filled with planes, cars and luxury liners of his own creation. . It was a world populated by carefree billionaires who expected to be served caviar at the fictional Fifth Avenue subway station and a car wash to spray their limousines with champagne.
“My work is so personal and bizarre that I have to create my own dictionary,” McCall said. 2008 TED TalkHe called it “retrofuturism” and defined it as “looking back and seeing what yesterday looked like tomorrow”.
With more than 80 gouache-on-paper paintings on the cover since 1993, readers of The New Yorker see his visual signature and comic world as that of the magazine’s cartoonists Charles Adams and Roz Adams. It was as recognizable as Chast.
“Bruce McCall’s Crazy Afternoon” (1982), “Last Dream O Rama: The Car Detroit Forgot To Make, 1950-1960” (2001), “All Meat Looks Like” South America: The World of Bruce McCall” (2003).
Critic and graphic designer Michael Biert wrote in the Design Observer in 2005 that he was “the visual poet of American gigantism.”
Bruce Paul Gordon McCall was born on May 10, 1935 in Simcoe, Ontario, to Thomas Cameron and Helen Margaret (Gilbertson) McCall. His father, known as TC, was a civil servant and later public relations manager for Chrysler in Canada. His mother was a housewife.
Bruce grew up with his five siblings in a home severely restricted by TC’s meager pay and Simcoe’s brooding provincialism in the southwestern corner of the state, not far from Lake Erie. This childhood purgatory provided the material for his 1997 memoir Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada. Her second memoir, How Did I Get Here?, is out in 2020.
When the family moved to Toronto in 1947, McCall’s feelings for his home country changed little. Mr. McCall later satirized in his Lampoon feature article “Shame of the North: Life in a Canadian Border Town.” It was a supposedly self-deprecating strip, showing derelict maple syrup and a louche emporium that promised forbidden pleasures such as “living, hatless girls.”
American popular culture, especially magazines and their advertisements, captured his imagination and conveyed “the message of tomorrow in steel and chrome,” he wrote in “Thin Ice.”
“Soon, a double-decker Boeing Stratocruiser with a cocktail lounge will arrive in Rio within 20 hours,” he added. “Everyman’s standard mode of transportation was becoming a car that could fly, an airplane that could be driven.”
After dropping out of high school in Windsor, where his family moved in 1953, Mr. McCall found work at a local agency, advertising for Dodge and DeSoto. “The Detroit products at the time, the giant products, were so bad that I found them ludicrous and ridiculous,” he told The New Yorker in 2002.
He was hired by AV Roe & Company in Toronto in 1959 to retouch photographs of pots and pans for their catalogue. A year later, his fortunes improved slightly when publishing company McLean his hunters hired him to publish short articles in trade publications such as his Pit & Quarry. He hated the job.
In desperation, sports car enthusiast McCall teamed up with a friend to launch Canadian Driver magazine. It lasted only his one issue, but led to a writing job at his Truck & Traffic Canada, where Mr. McCall soon became editor-in-chief.
His first crack into the American Dream came in 1962. Campbell of Detroit He Ewald He was the head of the agency and was when David E. Davis, who treated Chevrolet as a major customer, hired him to write advertising copy for the Corvette and Corvair. It was the starting point for his illustrious career in New York, at first he worked for J. Walter, he worked for Ford in advertising for Thompson. Later, at Ogilvy & Mather, McCall was in charge of advertising for Mercedes-Benz. For several years he ran his agency’s Frankfurt office.
In 1970, McCall and his friend Car and Driver editor Brock Yates invented a series of mythical planes. Playboy bought the idea and put Mr. McCall in charge of the illustrations, running a collaboration in January 1971 entitled “Major Howdy His Bixby’s Forgotten Warbirds Album”. It won Playboy’s Humor of the Year award.
“This popped into my head — I actually rearranged its contents.” McCall told McMillan In a 2008 website interview.
After returning from Germany, he drove to the National Lampoon offices with the legendary 1958 Bulgemobile catalog. The magazine offered him a contract for 25 pages of illustrations per year. He was soon offering spreads on the luxury liner Tyrannic (“so safe that she doesn’t have insurance”) and blue-blooded her sports such as tank polo and Zeppelin shooting. 1930s Popular Science In the series “Popular Workbench” based on his magazine’s extensive collection, he offers innovations such as his 4,000 hp diesel his typewriter weighing over three tons. bottom.
McCall wrote for the “National Lampoon Radio Hour” and returned to advertising after a brief and unhappy stint as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1970s. He joined the McCaffrey & McCall agency (co-founded by his unrelated McCall) who had just acquired a Mercedes account. After several years as Creative Director of Mercedes Advertising, he was appointed Executive Vice President and Creative Director of the company. He left in 1993.
By then, his career as a writer and illustrator was taking off. Fascinated by The New Yorker since childhood, McCall contributed humorous articles to the magazine’s Shouts and Murmurs section in 1980. After Tina Brown became editor in 1992, his illustrations appeared regularly on the covers of magazines and the backs of books.
Many of his illustrations have been featured in the 2021 exhibition The Fantastic City: Bruce McCall’s New York at the New York Historical Society. For a long time he worked from his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Amanda McCall. Two brothers, Walter and Michael. and his sister Christine Jerome.
Mr. McCall authored the children’s book Marveltown (2008) and provided illustrations for the 2010 children’s book The Steps Across the Water by New Yorker author Adam Gopnik. He collaborated with David Letterman in his 2013 lavishly skewered illustration of America’s ultra-rich, “This land was made for you and me (but mostly me): The Wild Billionaires.” Billionaire’.
Shivani Gonzalez contributed to the report.
