"It's With A Heavy Heart I Regret To Inform You" Dept.:
Will-man Rockwell-der
Mainstay Mad Magazine artist, co-creator of Little Annie Fannie and Goodman Beaver, and the man mostly responsible for the idea of background running gags in visual media after the Second World War, Will Elder, passed away yesterday. He was 86.
Dig, Dig, DIG DIG DIG!!
The guy could copy ANYBODY's art style - this was the thing that blew my mind the first time I saw his work in those occasional color comic book reprints that Bill Gaines would have bound into the MAD SUPER SPECIAL magazines of the 70's - comic-sized inserts in front of the magazine body that reprinted classic Elder and Wood movie and TV parodies. What was amazing about Elder's work was his ability to include an incredible amount of detail in his work that continued to tell the story outside of what was going on in the foreground of the plot. There would be these long extended jokes silently happening in the background of his panels, making each story a gas to read a second or third time after the first time you'd gone through the material that was the "A" Story. This is something that the Jim Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers, who directed the AIRPLANE and NAKED GUN movies, deliberately grabbed from Elder and they more-or-less re-created movie comedy in the 80s and after as a result. They were told it was an "MTV approach" and that they flooded the screen with jokes by film critics and media journalists who felt they were above Mad Magazine, but Jim and the Zuckers would correct them and acknowledged Kurtzman and Elder when they talked about it.
I especially loved Elder's Archie parody STARCHIE (he was a WEST SIDE STORY styled gang runner) and his classic PING PONG. My all-time favourite MAD magazine story tho was more of a conceptual story about a bank robber and escape artist "MOLE!", and it's out of love for Will's work that I'm reprinting that story here under the cut. Check him out.
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