I dont think that a displacement would be a good option for this, it would make an unruley mesh that would be hard to edit to get what this guy's after, though your right it would generate a mesh but as I said it probably would be a bit of a mess.

Personally Steve's suggestion to use curves would be the simplest and give the best results. Or in a similar way to what Chrone said, use some curves generated from illustrator, imported into maya.