Career
In the late 1940s, Elder and former classmate Kurtzman 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 Severin's pencils on stories for Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat and other titles.
When Kurtzman created Mad in 1952, Elder's 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!", satirizing the popular mid-1940s Dick Tracy villain named "The Mole". The Mad lampoon 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 the character was sometimes quoted ("Dig! Dig!") and even given a homage years later in a Psychology Today illustration; sixty-two years later, Mad's 2014 parody of the television prison series Orange Is the New Black included the image of Elder's Mole tunneling to freedom.
According to Jaffee, Elder "could have been the world's greatest forger". Elder had a chameleon-like talent for mimicking the precise styles of other cartoonists, which made the satiric effect stronger. This ability was showcased in such pieces as "Mickey Rodent!" (a takeoff on Mickey Mouse and Disney in general), "Starchie!" (Archie Comics), "Bringing Back Father!" (George McManus' Bringing Up Father strip), "Gasoline Valley!" (Frank King's Gasoline Alley), and others. Such was Elder's ability that some of these parodies featured specific observations about the source materials' art styles, with Elder switching illustrative gears in midpanel.
Elder had this to say about his mimicry:"Through imitation, I found an avenue of expression... if you're going to make an imitation of something, a facsimile, it's got to be convincing. When you convince people, then you can turn the tables and shock them as a result. Accuracy was part of it. If I could fool people to think that this was the real item, and then suddenly make them realize at the last moment that it wasn't, that in itself is surprisingly funny."
Elder's signature style, with extra humorous detail added upon humorous detail, is routinely described as "chicken fat," a reference to soup preparation. As Elder told an interviewer, "The term just came out of what we both [Kurtzman and Elder] knew were the parts of the strip that gave it more flavor but did very little to advance the storyline. That's what Chicken Fat does... it advances the flavor of the soup and, as we all know now, too much chicken fat will kill you!"[6]
Elder's rampant insertion of background gags set the tone for the comic book, quickly spreading into the panels of his fellow artists and imitators of Mad. Kurtzman described their collaborative process: "I would write a story, and as if by magic, all the empty spaces would get filled in by sub-jokes... he was an inexhaustible source." In 2004, Elder told an interviewer, "In Mad, Harvey never rejected any of my little extras in the story. I think he was much harder on the other artists, because my stuff made him laugh. As soon as he laughed I think he forgot that it didn't belong in the story!"[6]
Some viewers believe Elder's style of separate foreground and background actions was mimicked by Louis Malle in his 1960 film Zazie dans le Métro, in a restaurant scene where the background action begins to take precedence over the main character. “I thought people would notice and would laugh," said Malle, "but nobody did." Elder had drawn the article "Restaurant!" in 1954; the Mad piece was about a family and its meal, but the backgrounds were filled with numerous sight gags including the Bufferin aspirin ad campaign, hieroglyphics, a mop substituting for spaghetti, the RCA Victor dog, a toddler eating the plates, and a full coat rack including Viking helmet and deer antlers. Monty Python's Terry Gilliam said of Elder, "I don't know if anybody's really worked at that level as intensely as Willy did. And it never seemed to distract from the center." 21st-century Mad cartoonist Evan Dorkin put it more simply: "If God is in the details, Will Elder channeled God."[7]
Elder also drew for EC's other humor comic, Panic. His illustrated version of Clement Clarke Moore's "T'was the Night Before Christmas" included several irreverent images, including a "Just Divorced!" sign hanging on the back of Santa Claus' sleigh. As a result, sales of Panic were banned in the state of Massachusetts.[8] Elder included a self-caricature, being spun around on Santa Claus' hip as Santa "filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk"—the jerk, of course, is Elder.
