Will Elder passed away late last week, Born Wolf Eisenberg, he both had a unique personal style and the gift of perfect mimicry of other artists. His mimicry of advertising art was indistinguishable form the real thing, until you found the gotcha. I’ve heard it argued that he actually had multiple personal styles, his painted work considered from his line work. He was the origin of Mad’s gag art in the margin, although in his case it was additional gags he wrote and blended perfectly with the art for the (usually Kurtzman written) piece he was illustrating. This became known as Chicken Fat or Chotchkies. Along with Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood he was the backbone of the original Mad Magazine. For those of you that don’t know, Mad was the only EC comic book to survive the great Comic purge of the early 50’s, in which various clergy and a certain psychologist claimed that comic books were perverting the youth of Amerika. Elder was unique in his mastery of parody and satire, his become famous not for his pioneering work at Mad, but for Little Annie Fanny, and adult strip he and Kurtzman did for Playboy.
I grew up reading the old copies of Mad that littered the barbershop we frequented, and coveted the bound in copies that Mad put in their Specials in the early 70s, I bought all the mad paperbacks to get all the old work. Will Elder was one of the reasons I’ve used some variation of the ords parody and satire as my online nicknames for close to 30 years.
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