Monthly Archives: May 2008

Will Elder, a founding artist of Mad Magazine, has died at the age of 86. No word on the cause but I heard months ago that he was in a nursing home and not expected to live even this long.

Will Elder was born Wolf William Eisenberg September 22, 1921 in the Bronx and grew up there. One of his childhood friends was Bess Myerson, who was later a beauty queen and a panelist on TV game shows like I've Got a Secret. Elder was an inveterate practical joker (Bill Gaines, the publisher of Mad, once described him as "our only contributor who lived a life as crazy as our magazine") and when Myerson was crowned Miss America, Elder happily bet his friends — who did not know of his connection to her — that if they went to a public event where Miss America was appearing, she would take one look at him and throw her arms around him and smother him with kisses. The friends bet, Miss America did shower Elder with kisses, and the friends paid up. Elder later called it "the most satisfying money I ever made."

He made most of the rest of his money directing his impish sense of humor onto drawing paper. At Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, he met and bonded with a fellow student, Harvey Kurtzman, and also became friendly with several artists who would figure into his later career, including Al Jaffee and John Severin. Elder would describe his life after those days as "following Harvey wherever he went." For a time, it was into an art business called the Charles William Harvey Studio, which the two of them formed with an artist named Charles Stern. The studio did work for Prize Comics and other companies before dissolving as Kurtzman and Elder became exclusive to the legendary EC line of comics.

For EC, Kurtzman edited, wrote and occasionally drew two war comics. Elder's style was not particularly suited for war or anything too serious but he gamely inked pencil art by John Severin for various EC titles, including their prestigious science-fiction line edited by Al Feldstein. Occasionally, Elder would even try drawing a horror story on his own but that was not his genre.

His genre turned out to be Mad, founded in 1952 and the perfect vehicle for Elder's talents. He was not only its lead artist, working over Kurtzman scripts and layouts, but he contributed many ideas and the general mindset of the early Mad artistry. Elder is generally given most of the credit for founding what Kurtzman described as "The Chicken Fat School of Art," and I don't know quite what that means, either. It has something to do with filling the panels with little background gags and signs so that you have to read each story several times to get all the jokes.

Elder drew many of the most memorable stories in the comic book issues of Mad, including classic parodies of Archie, Wonder Woman, The Shadow, Mandrake the Magician and many more. When Kurtzman quit in a financial dispute, Elder went right along with him, working on virtually everything Harvey did after that. The path went from a fancier version of Mad for Hugh Hefner called Trump to a cheaper, self-published version of Mad called Humbug to an even cheaper publication called Help! Eventually, Kurtzman and Elder put most of their energy into what was at the time, the most expensive-to-produce (per page) comic strip/book ever, "Little Annie Fanny" for Playboy.

Annie appeared intermittently in Playboy from 1962 through 1988. That and occasional advertising jobs kept Elder happily occupied, though later he and Kurtzman returned to Mad for a few jobs. Several books of his work have been published in recent years, including Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art (a biography with art), Chicken Fat (an art and sketchbook) and two volumes that reprint the entirety of "Little Annie Fanny."

I interviewed Will Elder twice — once at a Comic-Con International in San Diego, once by phone. The former was on a panel at the 2000 con and when he arrived for it, he explained that he was feeling poorly and not up to participating. I persuaded him to at least sit up front with me and his fellow Mad contributors, Jack Davis, Al Feldstein and Jack Mendelsohn. I said, "If you don't feel like talking, you don't have to." He agreed.

All through the panel, I bypassed him in the discussions but would occasionally whisper to ask him if he felt up to saying something. He kept saying no so the talk proceeded without him. Near the end though, he agreed to answer one question if I made it easy. I asked him something simple. He answered it and got a big laugh. He then went on talking for about the next fifteen minutes, delighting the crowd and obviously feeling a lot better because of it. After the panel, several attendees scolded me for not involving him sooner.

I have never figured out if he really didn't feel up to speaking or if some sort of practical joke was being played on me. All I know is that Will Elder was a delightful funny man…in person as well as (obviously) on paper.

Across Ye Olde Internet, there's been a massive outpouring of affection and concern for Gene Colan, the longtime comic artist. Gene, who's drawn as many pages of fine comic books as any man alive, has a failing liver and other complications, and the relevant news sites have erupted with the sad news. (Some of them, by the way, are wrongly reporting that Gene is hospitalized. He is not. He's resting comfortably at home, getting what I'm sure is the best care possible from his loving spouse, Adrienne.)

Obviously, it's dreadful that a great guy/artist like Gene is in failing health. It's especially ghastly that he and his wife are looking at staggering pharmaceutical bills that will not be covered by their health insurance. I'm not sure why they don't have better nsurance — lack of funds, one might assume — but the reason doesn't change the fact that the Colans have this crisis.

There's not a lot out there that makes me mad but I find myself increasingly upset at what some call The Health Care Crisis in America. I know folks who, quite literally, have lost everything due to illness. The widow of a prominent comic book artist called me once to thank me for the obit I'd posted here and said, "I think the cause of death should have been listed as 'not being able to afford good medical care.'" Getting sick can be beastly expensive, more so than prudent planning can possibly cover.

We all have the issues that matter to us in upcoming elections. A biggie for me is that I think we have to do something about the cost of health care in this country. If we don't do it out of strictly humanitarian reasons, we oughta do it because sick people without insurance are a drain on all of us, on all of society. I'm not sure if Single Payer is the way to go, or if other proposals would be preferable…but letting the expenses spiral upwards and outta control is simply unacceptable.

In the meantime, there are things you can do for the Colans. Keep an eye on the weblog of Clifford Meth for all the latest info. Gene has given us so much over the years, it's more than fitting that we all give back.

Just read over what I wrote last night. I think it stopped being funny about 3:30.

Anything you write is funny if you stay up late enough.

Good night, Internet. See you in the morning…or maybe the afternoon.

You've all seen artists who set up in touristy places and do caricatures for ten or twenty bucks or whatever they can get. Tom Richmond used to do that before he worked his way up to probably the most prestigious gig a caricaturist can land…drawing TV and movie parodies for Mad. But he still has an interest in the business of street caricature and in this blog post, he notes that some of those folks like to display samples that are actually the work of others. Boy, you can't trust anyone these days, can you?

During the Writers Guild strike, a line made the rounds and I quoted it here…

Just got a message that says that production has shut down on the NBC hit sitcom, The Office. It seems its star, Steve Carell, has been calling in sick with what he claims is a case of "enlarged balls."

Just thought I'd note that in an interview in the current issue of Playboy, Mr. Carell says the quote is spurious. He did make it clear he would not work during the strike but, he says, he did not make the remark attributed to him. Well, he should have.

I haven't mentioned it lately here but the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's Archive of American Television continues to produce (and post to the web) important oral histories of the TV business.

They've just posted something I wish I had time to watch soon. It's a four hour (four hour!) interview with Don Pardo. Don is best known as the announcer on Saturday Night Live (and before that on the original Jeopardy!) but he's been a professional for over sixty years, doing just about every kind of show on which one can announce. That has to be a fascinating conversation.

Okay, here's how we pay off the national debt. We charge people who appear on television $100 for every time they say "At the end of the day…" and $200 for every time they make reference to throwing someone under a bus.

Based on watching election coverage the other night, we could balance the budget in about nine hours.

Dave Malkoff, a reporter for the local CBS News in Los Angeles, just did a story on the skyscraper that's going up at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. He took some stunning photos from the top of it and they're available for viewing here. Make sure you take a look at the very large 25.6 Megapixel 180º panoramic view of Hollywood.

Before I can begin to explain the picture above, you need to go read this post from February of last year.

All done? Fine. If you actually read it, then you know that as a small tot, I made my TV debut on a local Los Angeles TV show called Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. I remembered how much I disliked it but I was unable to place exactly how old I was at the time…two, three, older? You can ignore all the sterling detective work that I did in that post because most of it was wrong. I appeared on the show on March 1, 1955, one day shy of my third birthday.

And above, we have incontrovertible evidence. I've recently been having my hard-working assistant Tyler scan all the old family photos my mother could find and in one box, I came across my "passport to the Castle of Dreams" for that traumatic day. (On the back of it, in my mother's handwriting, there's a list of relatives and neighbors I'm supposed to say hello to. As I recall, I mentioned not a one of them. By the way, the Castle of Dreams was a really badly-painted scene flat.)

That's about all I have to say about this. Just thought I'd finish the story and share this nifty little relic.

In the previous message, I did not intend to suggest that the e-mails I've been receiving about John McCain's age were coming from Ralph Nader supporters. Nader, by the way, is older than McCain.