The American Peter Sellers ... MAD magazine illustrator Will Elder
MAD magazine has never travelled well. Many Britons might know of it chiefly from passing references in another, better received American comic institution: the Simpsons has often alluded to it, either worshipfully or with scathing contempt. This seeming contradiction stems from the magazine's longevity. While MAD is latterly perceived as crude, weary and outmoded, there are few in the American humour business who don't revere its original incarnation. And rightly so. What the Goon Show was to 50s Britain - a joyously liberating instigator of laughter, creating an impression of anarchy via imaginative genius built upon rigorous labour - MAD was to the USA of the same era. It really was that good.
If founding editor Harvey Kurtzman was the nearest thing to MAD's Spike Milligan, then cartoonist Will Elder, who has died at the age of 86, bears comparison to Peter Sellers. A brilliant mimic and a versatile technician, he instinctively grasped what his boss was up to, and amplified Kurtzman's stories into immaculately rendered panels teeming with visual hyperbole, quirky characters, witty minutiae, running gags and throwaway jokes. (You can see why the Simpsons creators admire MAD so much.)
Kurtzman, Elder and company began by spoofing the blood-and-guts war, crime, sci-fi and horror stuff they had only recently been turning out themselves for MAD's owner, EC Comics. One of Elder's most memorable pieces was also one of the earliest: the marvellously eccentric tale of Melvin Mole, a tunnelling outlaw homunculus whose catchphrase - "Huh, huh! Dig, Dig, Dig, Dig!" - serves as a code by which aficionados of 50s MAD may identify one another.
Like everything else in the first issues, Mole was a relatively straightforward genre lampoon. Soon MAD moved on to what would become its signature pieces: specific pop culture parodies, some topical, some anything but. The MAD men had enough (justified) confidence in their readers to ambush whatever target seized their fancy. Elder's takes on King Kong, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe, Mickey Mouse and Archie might be described as zany, if the word were not nowadays so tainted by a self-regarding, jocular oafishness of which he was never guilty. Five decades on, they remain a feast of absurdity, and can be found in the superb compendium, MAD About The Fifties.
In 1957, two years after MAD expanded from comic book to magazine format, Elder followed Kurtzman out of the door and into the figurative embrace of Hugh Hefner, whose Playboy corporation launched and then closed Trump, on which both were fleetingly employed. Elder went on to illustrate Kurtzman's lewd and lovingly crafted Little Annie Fanny strip for Playboy itself, and enjoyed a long career in commercial art, both in and out of cartooning. But the MAD house style is his real legacy, and a hugely influential one, too - it's hard to imagine not only the Simpsons but also the 60s underground comics scene and the work of Terry Gilliam or Zucker, Abrahams & Zucker coming about without it. As the alternative comics creator Evan Dorkin put it upon learning of Elder's death: "If God is in the details, Will Elder channelled God."
