Satirist Will Elder goes to Heaven
 

Growing up, I was always an enormous fan of Bill Elder's work and to this day, I will give away copies of Inside Mad to new friends, who may have never witnessed his genius.

From the New York Times

Will Elder, whose frantic, gag-filled illustrations helped to define the comic identity of Mad magazine ... died Wednesday in Rockleigh, N.J. He was 86.

A dead-on caricaturist with an anarchic sense of humor, Mr. Elder stuffed the backgrounds ... with inane puns, silly signs and weird characters doing strange things.

“That approach to humor seeped into the rest of the magazine and the DNA of its contributors,” said John Ficarra, the editor of Mad. “It set the tone for the entire magazine and created a look that endures to this day.”

Mr. Elder called these background fillers “chicken fat,” explaining that they were “the part of the strip that gave it some flavor but did little to advance the story line.” This layered, free-for-all approach influenced the cartoons of R. Crumb and films like “Airplane!” and the “Naked Gun” series.

To read the article, click here


Will Elder

This, from an old MAD magazine has always stuck in my mind.

Man out of breath: "Pant, pant, pant, press, pant!"

It was one of those jokes that I knew was a joke, but didn't get. Until I learned that to "press" was another expression for "iron." Ha!

I will admit that I was actually unaware that Elder was (until now) still alive. As a kid, I spent long hours gazing at all the "chicken fat" in panel after panel of reprints from the early days of MAD. The often surreal, sometimes even creepy, always absurd world they created was, to me, much more compelling than the humor in the main text. (Though that was often quite clever and memorable as well.) I've got teh complete run of MAD on dvd-rom, but i'd love to have a high-quality, line art only bound book of this material. (The scans of old printed pages obscures a lot of the details on the DVD, alas.) Rest in Peace and thanks for all the inspired weirdness, Willie!

I met him very briefly at Comic COn a few years ago. He was already very elderly but I got an EC book signed by him.

RIP -

No relation