Will Elder has died at the age of 87, after a battle with Parkinson's. A commercial artist and cartoonist, he spent much of his life all but joined at the hip to the great Harvey Kurtzman, who created Mad for EC Comics in 1952. Elder, who had been a classmate and collaborator of Kurtzman's from years before, became the defining artistic voice of Mad in its comic book period; he and Kurtzman had similar senses of humor, and when Elder illustrated Kurtzman's scripts eviscerating such cultural touchstones as Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, and Archie and Jughead. After Kurtzman left Mad in 1957, Elder followed him loyally through a string of short-lived humor magazines: Trump (a Garden of Eden for print humor of the period, and one that lasted all of two issues), Humbug (which is set to be republished in its entirety later this year by Fantagraphics), and Help! Though it was the most uneven of all these publications, it was for Help! that Kurtzman and Elder created the doomed all-American careerist boy Goodman Beaver, star of their masterpiece, "Goodman Goes Playboy," featuring characters from their earlier "Archie" parody. That story was kept out of circulation by years due to threat of legal action from the publishers of "Archie" comics, who were unamused to learn that their red-headed cash cow was throwing orgies in his vast hipster crash pad after selling his soul to the devil. Which is ironic, since everyone who participated in suppressing the story has, of course, gone to Hell for it.
After Help! went bust, Kurtzman (who died in 1993) and Elder mainly kept their hand in with irregular installments of the Playboy feature "Little Annie Fanny", which boasted eye-popping, gorgeous painted artwork by Elder. In his later years, Elder busied himself by jovially witnessing his belated transformation into a living legend, a process helped along by the publication (in two volumes) of all the "Little Annie Fanny" stories as well as the gratifyingly thick tribute volumes Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art and Chicken Fat. Although he never actually worked for the movies, to a great degree, movie comedy of the second half of the twentieth century is unimaginable without Elder's influence. His propensity for packing gags upon gags is there in the work of such directors as Richard Lester and the Louis Malle of Zazie dans le Metro, not to mention Airplane!, and the self-conscious analysis of pop culture that he and Kurtzman developed in their work planted the seeds for much of what sprouted in movies in the 1960s and 1970s, from the use of old gangster and private eyes movies as the basis for something new and self-critical in Bonnie & Clyde and The Long Goodbye to George Lucas reviving old Saturday matinee serials with a more or less straight face. Portzebie, and out.