Evan Dorkin ([info]evandorkin) wrote,
@ 2008-05-15 18:43:00
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Entry tags:will elder

Will Elder R.I.P.
Cartoonist Will Elder passed away today. I consider him one of the all-time greats, and his influence on my work is substantial. I am in awe of his work, the effort he put into his drawings, the dynamic style, the seemingly effortless aping of other artist's signature styles, his pen work, his sense of humor, his playfulness on the page, his insane background gags, and just how much he loaded into a standard page of comic art. If God is in the details, Will Elder channeled God.

If you want to be a cartoonist, or just appreciate amazing cartooning, and you do not know this man's work, for shame, doc, for shame. Look and learn: EC, Mad, Panic, Trump, Humbug, Help!, Goodman Beaver, Little Annie Fanny. He was the great Harvey Kurtzman's greatest collaborator, together they were perhaps the greatest two-man tag-team in comics.
 
He was one of the best.

Recognize.

 


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[info]ltmurnau
2008-05-15 11:08 pm UTC (link)
CHICKEN FAT!

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[info]jtron
2008-05-15 11:15 pm UTC (link)
He sure was. When I get home I'm digging up my MAD Archives DVD and giving it a memorial spin.

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[info]sclerotic_rings
2008-05-15 11:17 pm UTC (link)
That just punched me right in the heart. I may have never been any damn good at drawing, but Elder's work made me realize that sometimes it's the background details that are more entertaining than the main focus, and boy howdy did he make me want to be a good artist.

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[info]moroccomole
2008-05-15 11:20 pm UTC (link)
Sad news! I'll have to dig out my Little Annie Fanny collections. (And since I'm a total gay, my love of that series has to count as a more ringing endorsement than most.)

Has Trump ever been collected into book form?

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[info]argentsoma
2008-05-15 11:45 pm UTC (link)
Ah, you're kidding! Man, what a bummer. I bought that Little Annie Fanny book awhile ago and then started to soak up everything else by him. His inkwork on some of the old Two-Fisted tales is just awesome. I love those old war story books.

Tragic, but I'm glad to have known of his work these past years.

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[info]spasmsproject
2008-05-16 01:12 am UTC (link)
No! Fuck.

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[info]gpselser
2008-05-16 01:51 am UTC (link)
His early Mad work was one of my favorite things to read when I was a kid. I use too scour the used bookstores looking for the early digest with his work. I loved all the detail and would look over it carefully finding all the little jokes.
This is very sad
Rest in peace Will

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[info]doodlesthegreat
2008-05-16 03:01 am UTC (link)
Is that the last of the old EC artists gone? I can't recall.

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[info]evandorkin
2008-05-16 04:01 am UTC (link)
There's John Severin and Jack Davis, who are both still working, in fact. And Al Feldstein. Colorist Marie Severin is still with us, she had a health scare recently, hopefully she's doing well.

I think that's everyone...Kurtzman's gone, Wood, Craig, oh, wait...Jack Kamen is still kicking, I believe.

Otherwise, Crandall, Orlando, Krigstein, Ingalls, Evans...Toth did a couple of stories...now Elder. Fah.

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[info]inkstuds
2008-05-16 05:07 am UTC (link)
Dont forget Al Williamson.

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[info]evandorkin
2008-05-16 05:48 am UTC (link)
Cripes, I did! Figured I'd forget someone. Yeah, Al Williamson. And hell, Frank Frazetta, he did a few strips, ghosted on some of Williamson's stuff iirc. Is Angelo Torres still alive? He chimed in on some of their jobs, too, didn't he?

And Harry Harrison, he worked with Wood on EC art jobs before he went off to have a writing career. I think he's still around. I'm no expert on early EC stuff, so I dunno who might still be around that worked on Moon Girl or the Bible comics or whatever the heck. But I think we covered all the big names on the New Trend titles. I think.

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[info]jackolantern
2008-05-16 01:39 pm UTC (link)
Harry Harrison was a cartoonist? Sheesh, you really do learn something new every day.

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[info]inkstuds
2008-05-16 04:49 pm UTC (link)
i dont know if Al Jaffee counts, but he did go to highschool with Elder.

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[info]evandorkin
2008-05-16 08:02 pm UTC (link)
And Jaffee and Arnold Roth were in Humbug and are still at it. As far as Elder-related oldsters goes. We're off EC now, but Jaffee is a Mad mainstay, too. Don't know when he debuted, though.

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[info]schung1968
2008-05-16 06:23 am UTC (link)
I loved Bill Elder's Ping Pong, Starchie, and Howdy Dooit parodies the best.

Russ Heath and Joe Kubert also did EC art jobs.

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[info]jtron
2008-05-16 06:46 pm UTC (link)
Bupgoo! Howdy Dooit sent me into pants-brownening peals of laughter when first I read it.

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[info]scabrendan
2008-05-16 06:01 pm UTC (link)
Ah, heck. That's a lousy piece of news to hear.

Recognize.

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[info]cells_dividing
2008-05-16 08:17 pm UTC (link)
When I moved to New York three years ago, the first book I checked out at the Mid-Manhattan Library was a horrifically soiled copy of Little Annie Fanny vol. 1. God only knows what it had gone through before I had a chance to read it. It was my first substantial exposure to Elder's work, and led me to The Mad Playboy of Art (conveniently located at the same library). I think Daniel Clowes had a quote in that book on the infinite re-readability of Starchie. He wasn't lying. That thing is the osmium of humor comics (i.e. dense), but simultaneously never a chore to read.

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[info]evandorkin
2008-05-17 06:18 am UTC (link)
The Mad Playboy of Art is really worth owning. I ended up taking it down from the shelf and going over it last night for about an hour, despite my intention to not go maudlin/fanboy and pick up some Elder to read for the occasion. I succumbed, figured I'd flip through a few pages, and ended up reading the Clowes introduction, a batch of biographical passages, and then stared at a lot of comics and drawings. And a lot of chicken fat. Looked for the Ping Pong title semi-splash with the guy who has his hand through another guys head and mouth, the panel with the panicking natives and crewmen, where one sailor has all his body parts mixed up for no apparent reason other than it adds to the nonsense and is funny as hell. He was friggin' amazing.

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[info]puddingsock
2008-05-17 03:37 am UTC (link)
Hi Evan,
Haven't checked out your site in a while, but when I got the news yesterday I knew I had to dial it up. I know you share my great respect for the man in question, as our one topic of conversation when I met you in 2002 at SPX revolved around the influence his crazed commitment to details had on our often over-labored pages. If there was some manic little angel on my shoulder when I drew the Simpson's story you wrote, "Spree For All", it was Willy-- egging me on to throw in as much gags and eye candy as possible. I could never match him-- noone could-- but I'm happy to have had him as my number one influence for over twenty years. I'm still assessing things right now, skimming the various message boards and homepages to find out what the reaction's been... and so I was very glad to read this post. I think you're one of the few out there to FULLY appreciate what this particular madman was all about.

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(Anonymous)
2008-05-17 04:01 am UTC (link)
That's really sad. I didn't even know that he was sick! When I heard Elder had passed, your blog was the first place I checked - I can't think of a working cartoonist more fit to pay him tribute. It's awkward to say something like this, but if anybody is following in his footsteps, it's you. I hope they finally put Goodman Beaver back into print, that thing is a masterpiece.


-Abe

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(Anonymous)
2008-05-17 06:39 am UTC (link)
Nice to hear from both you guys checking in.

I can, at best, only emulate the surface frenzy in Elder's work. I wish I had the chops. The delineation, the composition, not to mention the goddamned inking, there I'm so many leagues below him I can see the Nautilus coming my way. I wish that was false modesty. I developed my style via cartoonists like Elder, and Wally Wood's Mad strips, and Kurtzman (w/o even knowing it at the time) and Don Martin, and as a superhero fan, via guys like George Perez and Kirby. I liked detailed pages, or at least, pages where I didn't feel the artist was skimping on what was necessary to sell the ideas of crowds, confusion, fight scenes, battle scenes, mayhem, locations, extra gags, etc. But for me, the detail work came into play not just because I gravitated to it, but to obscure the faults in my draftsmanship. And the anal compulsive need to cover all the white space on a page, something I still can't beat back after decades of drawing. I also still can't ace basic anatomy or fold theories or decent perspective or solid composition, I have shoddy fundamentals, so comparisons to Elder in any way other than we both do humor work and I like including background details make me feel awkward too, if it helps any. Too bad William Stout doesn't do comics (well, too bad for us, good for him), he kills on the whole EC crowd aesthetic, and can channel Elder really nicely.

God, I dig Will Elder's work. Dig, dig, dig...

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[info]evandorkin
2008-05-17 06:39 am UTC (link)
Whoops. That was me, obv. Forgot my puppet.

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Will Elder
(Anonymous)
2008-08-09 12:29 am UTC (link)
Thank you all for your kind words about one of the truly unsung heros of American comic art and just art in general. Filmmaker Joe Dante told me once that he felt that Elder was unjustly underappreciated...you folks have done a great deal to make sure that is not so.
Thank you-
Gary VandenBergh
(Will's son-in-law and most loving fan)

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