Will Elder

Elder was posthumously inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame in 2019 at New York Comic Con, alongside fellow Mad contributors Jack Davis, Marie Severin, John Severin, and Ben Oda.

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.

Elder died on May 15, 2008 from complications due to Parkinson's disease in Rockleigh, New Jersey.

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!"

Elder was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003. In 2018, the Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon described Elder as "an amazing artist, a sneaky spot-holder on the top 20 of the 20th century".

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 compiles drawings, sketches, cartoons and doodles by Elder, most of which had never been published. In 2009, Fantagraphics published a complete boxed collection of Humbug.

During World War II, he served as a part of the 668th Engineer Company (Topographical) of the First Army, as part of the mapmaking team in advance of the invasion of Normandy. Sometime after returning home, he adopted the name Will Elder.

While the owners of Archie had taken offense, the owner of Playboy did not. Hugh Hefner, a fan of Kurtzman and "Goodman Beaver", commissioned Kurtzman and Elder to create a similar but more lavish strip for Playboy. The result was Little Annie Fanny. Like Goodman Beaver, Little Annie Fanny was a pure-of-heart innocent; unlike him, she was regularly divested of her clothing. The Annie Fanny series (107 stories in all) was irregularly published in the back of Playboy for more than a quarter of a century from October 1962 through September 1988. In 2001, Dark Horse Comics published the trade paperback collections Playboy's Little Annie Fanny, Volume 1 (.mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit;word-wrap:break-word}.mw-parser-output .citation q{quotes:"\"""\"""'""'"}.mw-parser-output .citation:target{background-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133)}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Lock-green.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon a{background:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg")right 0.1em center/12px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:none;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint{display:none;color:#3a3;margin-left:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right{padding-right:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .citation .mw-selflink{font-weight:inherit}ISBN 1-56971-519-X) and Playboy's Little Annie Fanny, Volume 2: 1970–1988 (ISBN 1-56971-520-3).

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."

Elder collaborated frequently throughout his career with Kurtzman. After leaving Mad in 1957, the two worked together on a string of short-lived humor magazines: Trump, Humbug and Help!. For Help!, Elder and Kurtzman created Goodman Beaver, a well-meaning naif whose trust in human nature and goodness were forever being undercut. One installment depicted the characters of Archie Comics as thoughtless hedonists, and was titled "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy!". This parody resulted in a lawsuit from Archie Comics. Kurtzman and Elder had previously irritated the Archie publisher with a parody in Mad ("Starchie!"). Archie Comics ended up with possession of the story's copyright. When the full Goodman Beaver series was reprinted by Kitchen Sink Press, the story could not legally be included. However, after Archie Comics failed to renew its copyright, the original "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy!" went into public domain and was published in Fantagraphics' Comics Journal.

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.

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.

William Elder (born Wolf William Eisenberg; September 22, 1921 – May 15, 2008) 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.