| Plenty of artists throughout the years have been credited with creating quintessential satirical voices – Jonathan Swift, the Marx Brothers, Monty Python – but few can say they gave satire a look.
And foremost among those few is a practical-joke-loving man now living out his golden years in New Jersey, while subsequent generations of satirists, consciously or otherwise, plunder his work.
That man is Will Elder – an original Mad magazine artist, the co-conspirator of comics legend Harvey Kurtzman and the draftsman of the billowy breasts of Playboy’s long-running comic character Little Annie Fanny.
While Kurtzman was the voice of the duo’s satire throughout much of both men’s careers – Kurtzman was Mad’s first editor and wrote Little Annie Fanny for its entire 1962 to 1987 run – it is Elder’s hand that created the lingering images. Although Kurtzman is now a legend, Elder has often been relegated to the role of sidekick, an injustice that may be remedied with a new book, Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art. The retrospective confirms what comics buffs have known for years – Elder’s fine-art brush-and-ink skills and irreverent sense of humour were as important to the duo as Kurtzman’s studious satire, and his work continues to influence everything from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live to The Onion.
Elder says he didn’t consider satire as a career in his youth, but it’s impossible to tell that from The Mad Playboy of Art. Nearly every photograph of Elder in his younger years in Depression-era Brooklyn shows him mugging for the camera with a wagging tongue or crossed eyes. But even his early "doodles," as he calls them, show formidable art skills.
"I was a zany kid," Elder says in a phone interview from his New Jersey home. "I loved practical jokes. I thought they were brilliant in their own sense. No one buys practical jokes. They get you in trouble."
After attending art school, Elder landed a gig with EC comics and found himself working on Mad, which caused a pop culture tidal wave almost as soon as it hit the stands.
Elder set Mad’s artistic tone. He squeezed gags into the backgrounds and between panels, rendered uncanny likenesses for its biting parodies and went on to paint advertising send-ups that make Adbusters look clumsy. It wasn’t his distinctive style that had such an influence, it was his lack of style – like all great satirists, his strength came from his ability to accurately ape his subjects.
Elder says his work was simply an extension of his personality.
"It’s the feeling of being the only kid on the block with a sense of humour and a piece of chalk in the hand. (That) was enough of a reason to do the things I wanted to do," he says. "I was exaggerating it an awful lot and that was the pleasure."
Elder followed Kurtzman away from Mad in a dispute over ownership in 1956. After several failed attempts to create their own satiric magazine, the two found themselves creating Little Annie Fanny for Playboy magazine. Although the comic strip never reached the satiric heights of Mad (its premise centred around the naïve title character continually finding herself in situations where her clothes were liabilities, and it attracted some of the same cries of sexism as the rest of the magazine), it was a technical triumph for Elder. The strip was completely hand-painted in glorious watercolours – it is still called by many the most labour-intensive comic ever produced – and Elder was its true star.
While one would expect Elder to be enjoying the satisfaction that comes with a retrospective filled with gushing praise from some of pop culture’s most influential artists – Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam, Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia and modern comix genius Daniel Clowes, to name a few (the latter of whom calls Elder "a Mozart of zaniness") – he’s still got the eye of an artist. He says he’s satisfied with the book, but nonetheless manages to find little faults in it that only a creator would notice. He’s also kept his critical eye (he says the contemporary Mad "doesn’t have the originality. There’s something missing") and, thankfully, his sense of humour.
"(The book) was hard work. Very hard. The hardest part was making sure you don’t offend anybody," he says, chuckling. "That was a challenge." |
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