Dave Deal: The Artist Who Made Horsepower Human | Write-Up

Dave “Big Deal” Deal (1938–2008) was the artist who made horsepower feel human. Emerging in the 1960s and coming into his own through the 1970s and into the early '80s, Deal didn't paint cars as machines, he turned them into characters, all exaggerated grins, straining fenders, and wheels that looked ready to spin before the engine even caught. That instinct, parts and pieces with personality, is exactly why Jackman brought him on as the brand's original commissioned artist, putting his hand on everything from ad art to the wheel designs themselves.

For years, Deal's work was the first thing a dealer or a customer saw, catalog after catalog, cover after cover, each one carrying his same eye for character straight onto the page that introduced the product. It's one thing to hire an artist for a single ad. It's another to hand him the cover, year after year.

Deal's reach went well past Jackman, too. He drew the covers for CARtoons Magazine, and in the 1970s he created Deal's Wheels, a line of exaggerated, caricature model car kits produced by Revell that put his characters directly into kids' hands, not just on a page.

He was working against the grain of his own era, too. As performance was getting more corporate and more polished, Deal's cartoons celebrated excess and individuality, a DIY attitude that prized personality over polish. His cars leaned forward like they were about to launch, alive in a way that echoed the optimism of postwar California car culture. Nothing captures that better than his lug nut dude, a recurring character built out of the hardware itself, small proof that Deal never met a car part he couldn't give a face to.

That sense of humor made speed feel approachable, a kid with one of his posters on the bedroom wall felt like part of the scene, not just a spectator to it. Deal's reach even crossed into the era's airwaves. He was a devoted fan of Wolfman Jack, the radio DJ whose voice helped shape rock and roll radio and who made his own cameo in American Graffiti. That admiration turned into something real. Wolfman Jack himself did promotional work for Jackman Wheels, and Deal's tribute to him became the Jackman Wolf, a character and logo that's still the basis for some of the brand's branding and merch today.

That same eye for character is what eventually brought Deal to Hollywood. When Pixar was developing Cars, director John Lasseter asked Deal directly to help design the film's primary characters, the same job he'd been doing for Jackman for years, aimed at a different studio. Deal's concept sketches shaped how Lightning McQueen, Sally, Doc Hudson, Luigi, Ramone, and Sarge came together, and he helped the animators solve a problem no one else had: how to make a car emote without breaking the joke, right down to where the eyes should sit relative to the headlights.

Today, Deal's legacy is a reminder that automotive culture was never really about specs or trophies, it was about emotion, imagination, and attitude, drawn in ink and rendered larger than life. It's the same eye that gave Jackman its character, and the same eye Pixar borrowed to give a whole world of cars theirs.