Bruce McCall, whose satirical illustrations for National Lampoon and The New Yorker evoked a plutocratic dreamworld of luxury zeppelin travel, indoor golf courses and cars like the Bulgemobile Airdreme, died Friday in the Bronx. He turned 87.
His wife, Polly McCall, said his death at Calvary Hospital was caused by Parkinson’s disease.
Borrowing from the advertising style seen in magazines such as Life, Look, and Collier’s in the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. McCall depicted a luminous fantasy land filled with planes, cars, and luxury passenger ships of his own creation. It was a world populated by carefree millionaires who expected caviar to be served in the stations of the fictional Fifth Avenue Subway and car washes to spray their limousines with champagne.
“My work is so personal and so strange that I have to invent my own lexicon for it,” said Mr. McCall in a TED Talk in 2008. He called it “retrofuturism,” which he defined as “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow.”
To readers of The New Yorker, which featured more than 80 of his gouache-on-paper paintings as covers from 1993 onward, his visual signature and comedic universe were as recognizable as those of the magazine’s cartoonists Charles Addams and Roz. chast.
A wider audience knew Mr. McCall through the collections “Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons” (1982), “The Last Dream-o-Rama: The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build, 1950-1960” (2001), and “All Meat Looks Like South America: The World by Bruce McCall” (2003).
He was “our country’s greatest unrecognized design visionary,” wrote critic and graphic designer Michael Bierut in 2005 in Design Observer, “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 PR manager of Chrysler in Canada. His mother was a housewife.
Bruce grew up with five siblings in a house tightly bounded by TC’s meager salary and Simcoe’s stern provincialism, in the southwest corner of the county, not far from Lake Erie. This childhood purgatory provided the material for his 1997 memoir, “Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada.” A second memoir, “How Did I Get Here?”, was published in 2020.
The family’s move to Toronto in 1947 did little to change Mr. McCall’s feelings about his native country, which he later denounced in a feature film for National Lampoon, “The Shame of the North: Life in a Canadian Border Town.” It showed, in a supposedly riotous strip, wandering maple syrup and seedy empires promising such forbidden pleasures as “living, hatless girls.”
American popular culture captured his imagination, especially the magazines and their advertisements, which conveyed “tomorrow’s messages in steel and chrome,” he wrote in “Thin Ice.”
“Soon, biplane Boeing Stratocruisers with cocktail lounges would fly to Rio in 20 hours,” he added. “The standard transportation for everyman was about to be a car you could fly, a plane you could drive.”
After graduating from high school in Windsor, where the family moved in 1953, Mr. McCall found employment with a local agency that ran advertisements for Dodge and DeSoto. “The Detroit products at the time — those behemoths — were so horrible that I thought they were funny and ridiculous,” he told The New Yorker in 2002. “So the roots of satire were planted very early on.”
He was hired in 1959 by AV Roe & Company in Toronto to retouch photos of pots and pans for their catalogs. A year later his fortunes improved, marginally, when the Maclean-Hunter publishing house hired him to write short articles for trade magazines such as Pit & Quarry. He hated the job.
In desperation, Mr. McCall, a sports car enthusiast, teamed up with a friend to start a magazine, Canadian Driver. It only lasted one issue, but it led to a writing job at Canada Track & Traffic, where Mr. McCall soon became editor-in-chief.
His first crack at the American dream came in 1962, when David E. Davis, the head of the Campbell-Ewald agency in Detroit, which had Chevrolet as a major client, hired him to write ad copy for Corvettes and Corvairs. It was the springboard to a blossoming career in New York, where he initially worked on Ford advertising at J. Walter Thompson. Later, at Ogilvy & Mather, Mr. McCall was put in charge of advertising for Mercedes-Benz; he ran the bureau’s Frankfurt office for several years.
In 1970, Mr. McCall and his friend Brock Yates, the editor of Car and Driver, invented a series of mythical aircraft, including the Humbley-Pudge Gallipoli Heavyish Bomber, for which they wrote pseudoscientific historical notes. Playboy bought the idea, commissioned Mr. McCall to do the illustrations, and spearheaded the collaboration in January 1971 under the title “Major Howdy Bixby’s Album of Forgotten Warbirds.” It went on to win Playboy’s annual humor award.
“This went to my head – basically rearranged its content,” Mr McCall told Macmillan in an interview for his website in 2008. “Based on that one fluke, I now felt justified in seeing myself as a working professional humorist.”
After returning from Germany, he made his way to the offices of National Lampoon with a catalog for the mythical 1958 Bulgemobile. The magazine offered him a contract to illustrate 25 pages a year. He soon delivered spreads on the luxury liner Tyrannic (“So safe she carries no insurance”) and blue-blood sports like tank polo and zeppelin shooting. “Popular Workbench”, a series based on his large collection of popular science magazines from the 1930s, featured innovations such as a 4,000 horsepower diesel typewriter that weighed more than three tons.
McCall wrote for “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and spent a brief, unhappy stint as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1970s before returning to advertising. He joined the agency McCaffrey & McCall (co-founded by an unrelated McCall), which had just landed the Mercedes account. After serving several years as creative director for Mercedes advertising, he was named executive vice president and creative director of the agency. He left in 1993.
By then, his career as a writer and illustrator had taken off. A crush on The New Yorker since childhood, McCall submitted a humorous article to the magazine’s “Shouts and Murmurs” section in 1980, the first of more than 80 articles to be published over the next 40 years. After Tina Brown became editor in 1992, his illustrations regularly appeared on the cover of the magazine and in the back of the book.
Many of his illustrations were featured in 2021 at the New-York Historical Society in the exhibit “The Fantastic City: Bruce McCall’s New York.” He had long worked from his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Amanda McCall; two brothers, Walter and Michael; and a sister, Christine Jerome.
Mr. McCall wrote the children’s book ‘Marveltown’ (2008) and provided the illustrations for ‘The Steps Across the Water’, a 2010 children’s book by New York writer Adam Gopnik. Then, in 2013, he collaborated with David Letterman on a lavishly illustrated skewer of America’s super-rich, “This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me): Billionaires in the Wild.”
Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting.