Will Elder - Illustration History

Biography

Born Wolf William Eisenberg, Will Elder was part of the founding staff that worked for MAD in the 1950s. Growing up during the Great Depression, Elder was one of four children to Polish immigrants. His father worked in a clothing factory, while his mother was a housekeeper. His relationship with his mother was distant, compared to his father who was proud of his artistic abilities and would often brag about him to his buddies. Elder spent much of his childhood getting in fights and making friends through his art and humor. Around the time Elder was fourteen or fifteen, he attended the High School of Music and Art where he was classmates with future MAD contributors Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, Al Jaffee and John Severin. The program lasted four years and he was part of the first graduating class.

Prior to graduating, in 1938, Elder worked with Jaffee’s brother, Harry. At the time, Harry was working on model airplanes for display in the windows of department stores. Elder helped out with Harry’s tracings on illustration board, which Harry would then go over with gouache. Harry made a lot of money on his airplane replicas, but Elder was paid very little for his contributions—the same for Harry’s brother Al, who also helped with production. After graduating in 1940, Elder worked a few odd jobs before studying for a year at the National Academy of Design in New York. He spent a year there before working for the Decal Company doing design and cartoons. He worked there for three months before he joined the Army in 1942. In the Army, he was part of the 668th Topographical Engineers, who spent their time creating topographical maps in advance of the D-Day landing at Normandy. He was present at the disembarkation in Normandy and participated in the liberation of Cologne. He spent most of his time in the European theater, and he was immediately discharged after the war.

Upon returning to the States, he changed his last name to Elder and began looking for work as an illustrator. In 1946, he began working on a story featured in Toy Town titled Rufus De Bree. Elder produced three stories for the comic before working with John Severin on other projects. The two worked together—Severin drew and Elder finished up with the inking. Elder knew Severin from his time at the School of Music and Art.

In 1946, Elder joined Harvey Kurtzman and Charles Stern when they created the Charles William Harvey Studio. The studio came together after the three figured that they could do better by working together and starting up a studio, rather than individually looking for work. However, the studio only lasted around eight months in part due to the lack of management. After the business went belly up, Elder continued to work with Severin. Between 1948 and 1951, the two worked on the comic American Eagle, which appeared in Prize Comics Western. Around this same time in the late 1950s, Elder and Severin began working for EC Comics. The two worked on titles such as Weird Fantasy, Frontline Combat, and Two-Fisted Tales. He continued to ink for Severin until Kurtzman started up his humor magazine, MAD.

Elder first worked for MAD from 1952 until 1957, and his work was routinely described as “chicken fat” due to his piling on of humorous detail and exaggeration. Elder appeared from issue #1 up until issue #31 in 1957. When Kurtzman left the magazine in 1956, Elder followed to seek other ventures, as well as participate in some of Kurtzman’s later works including Trump, Humbug, and Help! In 1962, he worked on Kurtzman’s Little Annie Fanny, which appeared in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine. However, after Kurtzman’s publications began folding, Elder began working for various other magazines. Although he had a steady work flow, his heart wasn’t in any of his illustrations. He was still very much into humor, and in 1985, both he and Kurtzman returned to MAD up until 1987. Elder contributed to 44 issues of MAD, and a collection of his advertisements, caricatures, cartoons, and illustrations were collected in his career retrospective Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art in 2003.

In 1988, Elder retired from commercial work around the age of 66. Following his retirement, Elder began painting for himself. When travelling, he loved to work in oils and watercolors—something he had done from time to time during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Looking back at his life, Elder said of working for magazines like MAD, Help, Trump, and Humbug—among others—“it took those earlier magazines and periodicals to give me the thrust that I had in later years. So I must pay my gratitude to those magazines even though I didn’t make a living at it.”[1]

In 2008, Elder died at the age of 86 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. In 2019, he along with other artists such as Jack Davis, Marie Severin, Ben Oda, and John Severin were posthumously inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame.

[1] Groth, Gary. “The Will Elder Interview.” The Comics Journal, February 8, 2011. Accessed May 24, 2024. https://www.tcj.com/the-will-elder-interview/.

Illustrations by Will Elder

Additional Resources

Bibliography

Kurtzman, Harvey, John Ficcara and Will Elder. MAD’s Original Idiots: Will Elder. New York: Mad Books, 2015.

Elder, Will, Gary Groth and Greg Sadowski. Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003.

Elder, Will and Gary Vandenbergh. Chicken Fat. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2006.