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I just learned the news from The Daily Cartoonist that Will Elder has died. Alan Gardner links to a great tribute by MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond. Tom links to Mark Evanier, as well as some great stories about Elder at Journalista!.

For those who don’t know, Elder was among the original stable of MAD Magazine cartoonists and a frequent collaborator with Mad founder Harvey Kurtzman. As a kid of the 1970s, I grew up reading MAD, absorbing stylistic tics from Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones, Al Jaffee, George Woodbridge and, of course, Don Martin. Then one day, I picked up one of MAD’s anniversary issues that had a bonus reprint of one of the original incarnations of the magazine from the 1950s - the Kurtzman era. It was like a whole other world, a completely different take on a magazine I had known so well. It was wilder, more anarchic, more irreverent, and screamingly funnier. I loved this MAD. I wanted more of this MAD. At the time, I didn’t know where to look, so I re-read that one issue, trying to suck in through my eyeballs all the drawing lessons I could absorb from both Elder and Wally Wood. To this day, as I draw I consciously and sometimes unconsciously ape elements of the detailed, gorgeously rendered yet highly energetic style Elder pioneered.

The NY Times Arts & Leisure section has a wonderful profile of Al Jaffee, the cartoonist behind MAD Magazine’s long-running “fold-in” gag and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” series.

Among the many great MAD cartoonists, the most influential for me as a young, budding toonster were Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker, George Woodbridge, and Jaffee. Drucker had spot-on caricatures, and Woodbridge had such a biting style. But Jaffee and Aragones drew what I considered proper “cartoons” by proper “cartoonists”: they wrote and drew their own stuff in a less realistic, more funny style. And they hit on a wide variety of subjects, from current events, politics, fashion and pop culture, to more sinister aspects of modern American society. I love this fold-out as described in the NY Times profile:

July 1968: “What is the one thing most school dropouts are sure to become?” A picture of teenagers at an employment center folds into a piece of artillery with a kid stuffed in it, and the answer: “Cannon fodder.”

Jesus, that’s brilliant. Bitter, angry, caustic - yet funny. It’s something I aspire to with every In Contempt strip I draw. Glad to see Jaffee continues to put out his stuff, despite cancer and advanced age, with a technique I am still too timid to take up: water color and gouache.  Photoshop has made things too damn easy.