Will Elder

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Will Elder

Will Elder self-portrait
Birth name Wolf William Eisenberg
Born September 22, 1921
Bronx, New York, USA
Died May 14, 2008
Notable works MAD Magazine
Little Annie Fanny

William "Will" Elder (September 22, 1921 – May 15, 2008)[1] was an American illustrator and comic book artist who worked in numerous areas of commercial art, but is best known for a zany cartoon style that helped launch Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book in 1952.

Mad publisher Bill Gaines approvingly called Elder "unquestionably the nuttiest guy who ever walked in the doors here." Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner said, "He was a zany, and a lovable one." Longtime Mad writer-cartoonist Al Jaffee called Elder "Absolutely brilliant... he was the star from the beginning. He had a feel for the kind of satire that eventually spread everywhere."[2]

Elder was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003.

Born Wolf William Eisenberg in the Bronx, New York, Elder was known in his teen years as "Wolfie." He served as a part of the 668th Topographical Engineers of the First Army, as part of the map-making team in advance of the invasion of Normandy. Sometime after returning home, he adopted the name "Will Elder."

Contents

[edit] Career

Kurtzman and Elder were classmates at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, where they were in the school's first graduating class. In the late 1940s, they teamed with Charles Stern to form the Charles William Harvey Studio, creating comics between 1948 and 1951 for Prize Comics and other publishers. At EC Comics, he inked John Severin's pencils on stories for Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat and other titles.

When Kurtzman created Mad in 1952, he immediately fixed upon Elder. Elder's wacky panels, filled with background gags, immediately attracted attention, first with "Ganefs!" in Mad's debut issue but especially in the second issue with "Mole!" The story depicted the successive efforts of prisoner Melvin Mole to tunnel away from the prison, first with a spoon, then with a toothpick and finally with a nostril hair. The wild exaggeration in this story left such a strong impression that it was often quoted ("Dig! Dig!") and even referenced years later in a Psychology Today illustration. Elder's device of separate foreground and background actions was referenced by Louis Malle in his film Zazie dans le métro (1960).

According to Al Jaffee, "[Elder] could have been the world's greatest forger." Elder also had a chameleon-like talent for mimicking the precise styles of other cartoonists, which made the satiric effect stronger. This ability was showcased in such pieces as "Mickey Rodent!" (a takeoff on Mickey Mouse and Disney in general), "Starchie!" (Archie Comics), "Bringing Back Father!" (George McManus' Bringing Up Father strip), "Gasoline Valley!" (Frank King's Gasoline Alley), and others. Such was Elder's ability that some of these parodies featured specific observations about the source materials' art styles, with Elder switching illustrative gears in midpanel (as in the sequence where "Mickey Rodent" and "Darnold Duck" literally locate the border between Disney cartooning and a more realistic drawing style. Both characters gain an additional finger on each hand as they cross over).

Elder had this to say about his mimickry:

Through imitation, I found an avenue of expression... if you're going to make an imitation of something, a fascimile, it's gotta be convincing. When you convince people, then you can turn the tables and shock them as a result. Accuracy was part of it. If I could fool people to think that this was the real item, and then suddenly make them realize at the last moment that it wasn't, that in itself is surprisingly funny.

Elder's signature style, with extra humorous detail added upon humorous detail, is routinely described as "chicken fat." This was a reference to soup preparation. As Elder told an interviewer, "The term just came out of what we both [Kurtzman and Elder] knew were the parts of the strip that gave it more flavor but did very little to advance the storyline. That's what Chicken Fat does...it advances the flavor of the soup and, as we all know now, too much chicken fat will kill you!"[3]

Elder's rampant insertion of background gags set the tone for the comic book, quickly spreading throughout into the panels of his fellow artists, and Mad's various imitators. Harvey Kurtzman described their collaborative process: "I would write a story, and as if by magic, all the empty spaces would get filled in by sub-jokes... he was an inexhaustible source." Monty Python's Terry Gilliam said of Elder, "I don't know if anybody's really worked at that level as intensely as Willy did. And it never seemed to distract from the center." 21st-century Mad cartoonist Evan Dorkin put it more simply: "If God is in the details, Will Elder channeled God."[4]

Elder was known as an inveterate prankster. As a child, he once cut out paper silhouettes of a man carrying a knife and a woman. Attaching them to a rotating record turntable, he projected their image onto the windowshade, and began screaming. People on the outside of the building saw what they thought was an assailant chasing his victim around the room. [5] EC colorist Marie Severin recalled, "Will used to have this painting of a deer... I guess it was one of those 5-and-10-cent store things. It had a deer, a mountain, some trees, a path, flowers and the like, and he'd change it with the seasons! If it was winter he'd paint snow on the deer, and then he would paint over that and put the sun out for the springtime with flowers coming up." Kurtzman recounted the time Elder and his playmates found a stock of fresh meat as a child: "These kids collected a bunch of clothes and they dressed the meat in clothes and spread the combination of meat and clothes along the right-of-way for about half a mile on the railroad tracks. Then Willy started shrieking at the top of his voice that Mikey had fallen down onto the railroad tracks. Naturally every woman for miles around who had a son named Mike went out of their mind, seeing this mess of clothes and meat along the tracks... this is the kind of kid that Willy was."[6] Years later, Elder still had a gruesome side to his humor, sending his wife a heart from a slaughterhouse as a Valentine's Day gift.

By all accounts, Elder's humor was compulsive. Al Jaffee described a portrait Elder once painted of his son: "It was a beautiful painting. It was all in very somber blues and black tones, very dark and brooding. After he finished it, he couldn't resist putting two little red dots on the kid's neck, as if a vampire had been there. He was always driven by the notion that something should be funny."

[edit] Post-Mad career

Elder collaborated frequently throughout his career with Kurtzman. After leaving Mad in 1957, the two worked together on a string of short-lived humor magazines: Trump, Humbug and Help!. For Help!, Elder & Kurtzman created Goodman Beaver, a well-meaning naif whose trust in human nature and goodness were forever being undercut. One installment depicted the characters of Archie Comics as thoughtless hedonists, and was titled "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy!". This parody resulted in a lawsuit from Archie Comics. Kurtzman and Elder had previously irritated the Archie publisher with a parody in Mad ("Starchie!"). Archie Comics ended up with possession of the story's copyright. When the full Goodman Beaver series was reprinted by Kitchen Sink Press, the story could not legally be included. However, after Archie Comics failed to renew its copyright, the original "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy!" went into public domain and was published in Fantagraphics' Comics Journal.

Hugh Hefner, a fan of Kurtzman and "Goodman Beaver", commissioned Kurtzman and Elder to create a similar, but more lavish strip for Playboy. The result was Little Annie Fanny. Like Goodman Beaver, Little Annie Fanny was a pure-of-heart innocent; unlike him, she was regularly divested of her clothing. The Annie Fanny series (107 stories in all) was irregularly published in the back of Playboy for more than a quarter of a century from October of 1962 through September of 1988. In 2001, Dark Horse Comics published the trade paperback collections Playboy's Little Annie Fanny, Volume 1" (ISBN 1-56971-519-X) and Playboy's Little Annie Fanny, Volume 2: 1970–1988 (ISBN 1-56971-520-3).

Elder's advertising art, caricatures, cartoons, illustrations and stories were collected in the 392-page career retrospective, Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art (Fantagraphics, 2003; ISBN 1-56097-603-9). The follow-up book, Chicken Fat (also by Fantagraphics) was published in 2006 and compiles drawings, sketches, cartoons and doodles by Elder, most of which had never been published. A full Fantagraphics collection of "Humbug" is scheduled for release in 2008.

In one form or another, from paperback to hardcover book to CD-ROM, Elder's seminal work for Mad has been continuously in print since 1954.

Elder died on May 14, 2008 from complications due to Parkinson's disease.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Haber, Matt. "Illustrator and Prankster Will Elder Dies at 86", The New York Observer, Observer Media, 2008-05-15. Retrieved on 2008-05-15. 
  2. ^ Will Elder, 86; original cartoonist for Mad magazine - Los Angeles Times
  3. ^ Will Elder Interview - Conversation with Willy
  4. ^ evandorkin: Will Elder R.I.P
  5. ^ Will Elder Oral Biography: Page 2 of 2
  6. ^ http://pics.livejournal.com/scottedelman/pic/00034e6k

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Contributors to Mad
"The Usual Gang of Idiots"
Editors
Writers
Writer-Artists
Artists
Photographers
Related articles