Will Elder Weekends: Will gets serious -- well, sort of

Here's the splash page of "Counter Clockwise," a story Will Elder inked over John Severin's pencils for Weird Fantasy #18, which was cover dated March-April 1953. Like most of the stories Elder inked for his old buddy Severin, it looks swell and displays his usual stellar technique, but there's a little something missing, a sense that an important part of Elder's talent is being reined in.


Of course, during the same time at EC comics, Elder was appearing in issues 3 and 4 of Mad Magazine, with the stories "Dragged Net!" and "Shadow!' -- and within the pages of Mad, absolutely nothing about Elder was ever, ever reined in.