The Mad Playboy of Art

by Will Elder, Daniel Clowes

The co-creator of MAD and Little Annie Fanny finally gets the career retrospective he deserves. Will Elder is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of the second half of the 20th century. And one of the funniest. He is best known for his artistic partnership with Harvey Kurtzman on all their most highly visible collaborations throughout their MAD magazine, Humbug, Goodman Beaver, Trump, and Little Annie Fanny . At long last, Elder is getting the book he so richly Will The Mad Playboy of Art , a gigantic coffee table book collecting his best work from more than a half a century of drawing and painting. The book will reprint a representative sampling of the work well-known to aficionados, including stories from the original MAD comic, independent efforts from Humbug, Help!, and Trump magazines, and Little Annie Fanny pages reproduced from the original, painted artwork. Above and beyond the known is the relatively unknown, obscure, or unpublished work, such as pages and spreads from a variety of magazines in the '50s and '60s that Elder contributed to (such as Pageant and Saturday Evening Post ), the infamous Norman Rockwell painting parody slated for the 3rd, unreleased issue of Trump , hysterical gag sketches, celebrity caricatures, oil paintings done for his family, and more. The book includes commentary by Hugh Hefner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Terry Gilliam, William Stout, and Jerry Garcia, who describe the impact that Elder's work had on satire and comic at in the second half of 20th century America. Elder himself comments on individual pieces, and Daniel Clowes, the author of Ghost World , supplies the introduction.

Genres: Comics, Biography, Art

300 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

William Elder (born Wolf William Eisenberg) was an American illustrator and comic book artist who worked in numerous areas of commercial art but is best known for a frantically funny cartoon style that helped launch Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book in 1952.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Elder

Reviews

[Al McCarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Elder was so amazing and perfect in so many ways.

[Dakota · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elder deserves to be remembered and appreciated by comic fans. This essay on Will Elder and the selected works shown do a great job to help with that. I will read this book many times before I die.

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This art-heavy book includes a brief bio of Elder, some appreciative essays, and a whole whack of his art, from early stuff (right back to childhood) through a generous selection of his comics work, and finishing up with some of his more serious watercolours and oils. It's a very good retrospective including a lot of rarely seen things, especially the non-EC stuff.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

So very excellent.