Will Elder | b 1921

Will Elder - b. 1921 - His Mad World - The Lives They Lived - Obituaries - NYTimes.com

Will Elder | b. 1921
His Mad World

By DAVID HAJDU
Published: December 24, 2008

’Twas a week before Christmas in 1953 when the artwork of Will Elder stirred the attorney general of Massachusetts to ban a comic-book adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s treasured piece of holiday piffle, “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The outlawed comic, titled Panic, was a spinoff of Mad, the wild and wildly successful year-old magazine for 14-year-old minds. Panic’s crime was having published Moore’s much-reprinted public-domain text, verbatim, to the accompaniment of outrageous, incongruous, stream-of-consciousness illustrations by Elder. None of the four-legged creatures that Elder drew in the opening panels were stirring, because all of them were dead — half-butchered carcasses of hogs, a goat, a baby elephant, a lion and the requisite mouse, all dangling from meat hooks, gushing blood. One of the animals, a small lamb, was still alive but stewed — that is, drunk from guzzling moonshine out of a jug nestled between its hooves. The sugarplums dancing in the children’s heads were Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and when the narrator of the tale settled down for his nap, he did so with a tall iced nightcap and six bottles of hooch scattered around his bed, alongside a sexy mama kerchiefed like a belly dancer.

“I had a good time thinking of every kind of wild way to interpret all the words of the poem,” Elder recalled a few years before he died. “I thought it was funny, but it happened that some other people didn’t agree. There were people out there who really didn’t like the idea that we were doing something for kids . . . [that] made fun of things that were supposed to be sacred, like Santa Claus.” The people who disagreed with Elder included not only Massachusetts state officials but also members of the New York City Police Department. A few days after that Christmas, cops entered the offices of Panic’s publisher, EC Comics, asked to buy a copy of Panic and arrested the receptionist for being willing to sell them one. The charges were unclear and dubious, but the transgression indisputable: the aesthetic lawlessness of Will Elder’s cartooning.

Elder was a master of an art beloved by kids and despised by their parents for its almost-criminal juvenility. Along with his childhood lunchroom buddy Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad, Elder was a primary creator of the gleefully rude, perennially adolescent, unaffected smart-aleck humor that would forever be thought of as the sensibility of American youth. With his art for Mad, for Panic, for lesser-known humor magazines like Trump and Help! and, finally, for Playboy, Elder found a window to the junior-high-school soul and chucked rocks through it, exposing that teen spirit in all its confused, hyperactive, self-absorbed glory and scariness. Earlier comic-book artists like Joe Shuster and Bob Kane may have invented the superhero, but Will Elder made possible “Superbad.”

“Will was the one who gave Mad magazine its look and style, which were different from any comic book that had been created before,” Kurtzman wrote in his memoir, “My Life as a Cartoonist.” “He was the one who started filling the margins of every page with hundreds of tiny cartoons. They had nothing to do with the story on the page.”

Connoisseurs of Elder’s style call it “chicken fat,” so named by its inventor for “the part of the soup that is bad for you yet gives the soup its delicious flavor.” Elder’s art was one of perilous excess. Elder was the funny pages’ answer to Charlie Parker and Allen Ginsberg and Lord Buckley, and he served as inspiration not only to the comix artists of the underground movement, like Robert Crumb, but also to rock musicians in their aesthetic neighborhood, like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Indeed, Garcia, who idolized Elder, once sought him out and invited him to a concert (at which Elder wore earplugs) and commissioned his idol to paint his portrait in oils. “I always liked that thing of overdoing it,” Garcia explained in an interview about Elder, “and here’s a guy who really understands what overdoing it is all about.”

The sleek, hyperrealistic portrait Elder did of Garcia, along with further evidence of his range and prolificacy in and out of comics, appears in the first of two books of Elder’s art: “The Mad Playboy of Art” and “Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles.” Both books reveal a craftsman of stunning ability, which Elder applied with cheerful randomness. He had the skill to render anything he saw so realistically that he left one early portfolio painting (a portrait of the old character actor John Carradine) unfinished, so it would not be mistaken for a photograph. Raised in poverty in the Bronx during the Depression, Elder had as much pride in his professionalism as he had in his artistry, and he always took the work he got, providing unfailingly meticulous and unexpectedly funny illustrations for slick magazines like Pageant.

“I had a family to feed,” he explained not long before he died. “But I always wanted to try to do a good job, and I always took the job seriously, and it was very important to me to be as silly as I possibly could be. I was very serious about that.”

As he grew older, his cartoons never lost their breathtaking immaturity. Indeed, the same impulses to excess and abandon that made his early comics feel like dizzying playground fun made much of his later work seem miraculously, sometimes maddeningly, infantile.

Elder spent the last decades of his professional life applying his extraordinary technical facility, his appetite for juvenility and his indiscrimination to the service of Playboy magazine. He wasted a quarter of a century collaborating with Kurtzman to produce the Little Annie Fanny comic strip, which has earned a place in pop-culture history as the most painstakingly executed piece of garbage ever to disgrace the names of comics and sex. Creatively, Will Elder died, at midlife, from too much chicken fat. n