My father has vivid memories of reading Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's "Robinson Crusoe" (Mad #13, July 1954) on a hot, hot afternoon at Texas A&M sometime back in the late mid-50s. That story, in particular its riff on Crusoe's drinking ("I took another cup of rum..."), has stayed with him ever since as the quintessence of cartoon hilarity. I agree; more than fifty years later, it's funny as hell.
Will Elder died yesterday (May 15) and there's hardly a way to make sense of that fact. Elder's career was long, winding, extraordinary; his influence on comics and comix, humorous illustration, and popular satire was deep. More to the point, the best of his work is just plain delightful.
In the course of writing an essay on Mad (for Greenwood Publishing's American Icons) I realized that one of the distinctive things about the early Mad, and the work of the Elder/Kurtzman team in particular, was the way it pulled the reader in different directions at once. Kurtzman's sense of timing, whether in comedy or in his grimly realistic war comics, was relentless: he pulled the reader along ceaselessly with his visual rhythms. The rhythms of Mad, as I wrote in that essay, added a comically deflating rimshot to the inexorable timing of the war comics: a sudden, surprising abruption to trump -- to burst -- Kurtzman's intense building-up of suspense. Will Eisner liked to refer to "reader discipline"; Kurtzman practiced it ceaselessly. You HAD to read ahead, and quickly. At the same time, though, you wanted to linger on a Kurtzman/Elder page; you wanted to absorb all the tangential background humor -- which wasn't really "background" at all, but essential to the experience of reading. Your eyes had to spend a lot of time on every page, usually on every panel. Elder rewarded your eyes, and your brain, for the effort. Collapsing the foregound/background distinction with all his chicken-fat extras, Elder kept you in the thick of it, caught between wanting to hurtle ahead to catch Kurtzman's punchlines and wanting to stay and savor the delicious detailing. No wonder reading Mad was such a tense (in the best sense) experience.
Along with Carl Barks, the Kurtzman/Elder Mads of the early '50s are the perfect comics of that era -- and they presaged a long and fruitful collaboration between the two artists. A match made in heaven, as the saying goes. To me the taproot of comics satire can be found in their early teamings, both the pop-culture character parodies ("Woman Wonder," with its knowing, devastating mockery of the original's feminist subtext; "Shermlock Shomes," in which the detective's mania matches the artists' own) and their miscellaneous humorous tales ("Mole" is perfectly constructed, practically a primer in comics form; "Restaurant" bust my gut when I read it as a kid, and it's still a howler).
I've often taught the Elder/Kurtzman "Starchie" (Mad #12, June 1954) alongside period Archie comics, as a study in prevailing ideas about teenagers in the '50s (the well-scrubbed Archie vs. the scuzzy JD Starchie), and it never fails to get a rise out of my students, not least because Elder's canny visual gags add so much, and so hilariously, to the strip's total effect of squalor and viciousness. Wonderful.
RIP, Will Elder.
(I refer everyone to Tom Spurgeon's substantial obituary for Elder, an excellent place to start if you want to explore further.)
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