Steve Bacher had this question for me…
I was perusing old MAD magazine issues from the 1980s and I have been wondering about the time that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder returned to illustrate numerous articles. What I'm curious about is why the art was credited to both together (and signed "WEHK"). I know that in the original comic book days, Kurtzman did the writing and I guess story layouts and Elder/Davis/Wood/Severin did the actual drawing, but in the 80s the writers are all from the Usual Gang of Idiots. So did WE and HK split duties? Did Harvey do the basic layouts and Will the rest? (A few articles have artwork credited to Kurtzman alone, in his distinctive style; the joint works are all in the Elder style.) Or did Elder do all the work but agree to share credit for whatever reason?
I put this very question to Nick Meglin, who was co-editor of MAD back then. His answer was kinda what I expected: "Harvey and Will figure out between them who'll do what and they do it and turn it in to us."
The assembly line method by which most comic books have been produced has convinced a lot of people that if two artists work on a story, one did all the art in pencil and then the other went over the pages and finished the art in ink. That's one way to do it but it's not the only way to do it. In newspaper strips especially, one sees many different divisions of labor…different ways in which the lead artist might employ assistants.
Al Capp sometimes laid-out Li'l Abner, sometimes he had assistants do it, sometimes they penciled, sometimes they inked. Often, Capp would ink the characters' heads (especially the ladies) and maybe the hands. Then again, I have an original Li'l Abner Sunday page which I think is pure Capp.
The later years of Steve Canyon, Milton Caniff sometimes penciled but often Dick Rockwell penciled and usually, Rockwell inked. Sometimes, Rockwell inked everything. Sometimes, he inked everything but the faces of recurring characters, including Steve. And sometimes, Caniff did some strips by himself.
Every Buick that comes down the conveyor belt on a given day may have had fifty people work on it and each one did the exact same thing on each Buick. Comics don't work like that, especially when artists work together, as opposed to collaborating through an editor. Harvey and Will were very close and their collaborations on Little Annie Fanny were done all different ways with many others participating, "who did what" often varying from panel to panel. In most of their jobs together, I would imagine that Kurtzman did most of the layouts and some of the penciling and Elder did the rest…but it wasn't necessarily the same split on every job.
