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.
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Will Elder
