Frank Jacobs, one of the most prolific writers in the history of Mad Magazine, passed away on Monday at the age of 92.

After the late, great Dick DeBartolo, Jacobs was the most prolific Mad writer who did not also draw his own strips (like Don Martin, Sergio Aragones or Al Jaffee). Even counting writer/artists like Jaffee, Jacobs was in the top seven most prolific Mad contributors, appearing in over 300 issues of the humor magazine.

Jacobs' first pitch to Mad, a story titled "Why I Left the Army and Became a Civilian," was not only purchased, but Mad even spotlighted it when it first appeared in 1957's Mad #33 (it also later appeared in the very first Mad paperback collection).

Jacobs had four other bylines in that very issue and that kickstarted his long and acclaimed association with the magazine. Over the years, Jacobs came up with a number of recurring bits and features (on top of the regular Mad parodies that we know and love. He did a really great "What if the Peanuts gang aged in real time?" strip that I always get a kick out of). One of them was to come up with obituaries for fictional characters, coming up with outlandish ways that they died...

A sharp recurring feature was the "Do-It-Yourself" news story, where he satirized the monotony of modern news stories, and how you could predict stories before they were ever written...

However, what Jacobs was best known for was his song parodies. Parody music has obviously existed for as long as there have been music to parody, but the 1950s and 1960s saw a huge surge in popularity for music parodies, from Stan Freberg to Tom Lehrer to Allan Sherman.

Mad Magazine was along for the ride, as well, and Jacobs was perhaps their most accomplished parody songwriter. He was a wizard with a verse. Weird Al Yankovic has cited Jacobs' song parodies as a major influence for his work, noting at the release of a Frank Jacobs tribute book a few years back (with a foreward by Yankovkic), "Frank Jacobs wrote most of the song parodies for MAD - one of my all-time heroes." In Mad #66, he and Wallace Wood did an iconic comic opera with actual comic strip characters that is beloved today by humor comic lovers...

Amusingly, Jacobs was also on the wrong side of a lawsuit when Irving Berlin and a group of other legendary songwriters (including Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers) sued Mad for its song parodies, arguing that they infringed on their copyrights. Mad won the case (here's an old Comic Book Legends Revealed on the lawsuit).

Jacobs was one of the recipients of the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing in 2009.