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Will Elder self-portrait

William Elder (aka Bill Elder) (born September 22, 1921 in the Bronx, New York) is an American illustrator and comic book artist who worked in numerous areas of commercial art yet is best known for a zany cartoon style that helped launch Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book in 1952. He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003.

Named Wolf William Eisenberg at birth, Elder was known in his teen years as "Wolfie" but changed his name after serving in World War II. During World War II, he served as a part of the 668th Topographical Engineers of the First Army. He is proud to have been a part of the map-making team that was instrumental in the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy.

Harvey Kurtzman admired Elder's antics at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art. Elder was a member of that prestigious High School's first graduating class. In the late 1940s, the two teamed with Charles Stern to form the Charles William Harvey Studio, creating comics between 1948 and 1951 for Prize Comics and other publishers. At EC Comics, he inked John Severin's pencils on stories for Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat and other titles.

When Kurtzman created Mad in 1952, he largely based it on Elder's antics from his youth. He was a natural for one of the comic book's original team of five artists (Kurtzman, Elder, Severin, Jack Davis and Wally Wood). and his wacky panels, filled with background gags, immediately attracted attention, first with "Ganefs!" in Mad's debut issue but especially in the second issue with "Mole!" The story depicted the successive efforts of prisoner Melvin Mole to tunnel away from the prison, first with a spoon, then with a toothpick and finally with a nostril hair. The wild exaggeration in this story left such a strong impression that it was often quoted ("Dig! Dig!") and even referenced years later in a Psychology Today illustration.

Whatever humorous slant Kurtzman devised in his layouts received a heightened hilarity and amplification when Elder sat down to draw the finished art, and Elder's insertion of background gags set the tone for the entire comic book, quickly spreading throughout into the panels of the other Mad artists and other comic books imitating Mad. Elder's device of separate foreground and background actions was referenced by Louis Malle in his film Zazie dans le métro (1960).

He collaborated frequently with Kurtzman. After leaving Mad, the two worked together on a string of short-lived humor magazines: Trump, Humbug and Help!. For Help!, Elder & Kurtzman put a new improved face on one of Kurtzman's creations from the Executive Comic Book, Goodman Beaver. Based on Candide, Goodman Beaver was short-lived but considered by many to be Elder and Kurtzman's greatest collaboration. Here they parodied Archie Comics again and found that without the backing of a larger organization like Mad, Archie Comics would leave no stone unturned to sue them and prevent them from ever publishing "Goodman Goes Playboy" again. Even though the target was Hugh Hefner, who loved the strip and the satire levied at himself. Hefner liked it so much that he had Kurtzman and Elder create a lavish strip solely for Playboy and Little Annie Fanny was born. Little Annie Fanny was a sexy, voluptuous female incarnate of Candide. Perhaps the most expensive and beautifully executed comic ever painted, Little Annie Fanny was published in the back of Playboy, irregularly, from October of 1962 through September of 1988, 107 stories in all. Only recently was the original Goodman Beaver satire of Archie/Hefner published in a Fantagraphics Comic Journal. The series, minus the Archie parody, was reprinted by Kitchen Sink Press with each panel expanded to page size so the readers could see all the little gags.

In 2001, Dark Horse Comics published the trade paperback collections Playboy's Little Annie Fanny, Volume 1" (ISBN 1-56971-519-X) and Playboy's Little Annie Fanny, Volume 2: 1970-1988 (ISBN 1-56971-520-3).

As well, Elder's advertising art, caricatures, cartoons, illustrations and stories were collected in the 392-page career retrospective, Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art (Fantagraphics, 2003; ISBN 1-56097-603-9). The follow-up book, "Chicken Fat", also by Fantagraphics was published in 2006 and is a compilation of drawings, sketches, cartoons and doodles of Elder, most of which have never been published.

• Mad Mumblings Feature story on the MAD legend.
• Gary Groth interviews Will Elder
• WillElder.net - the official website