Will Elder Inkwell Has Gone Dry

Cartoonist, illustrator, founding member of MAD Magazine and co-creator of Little Annie Fannie has died at 86.

Elder was born Wolfgang Eisenberg, in Brooklyn. As a student at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, he became friends with future collaborator Harvey Kurtzman. After a stint in WWII serving as a topographical engineer, Elder legally changed his name to William Elder. In 1948, Elder, Kurtzman and Charles Stern formed the Charles William Harvey Studio creating comics for other comic book publishers. In 1952, when Kurtzman started a crazy, way out new magazine called MAD, Elder was hired on as part of the magazine's team of five artists consisting of Kurtzman, Elder, John Severin, Jack Davis and Wally Wood.

Elder quickly gained a reputation for adding an additional level of humor and wit to the magazine. With background gags expanding into the panels and around the margins (think Sergio Aragones), it was Elder's touch that raised the bar of "reading between the frames" for which MAD has become so well known.

After Kurtzman and Elder left MAD, they worked together on a long line of MAD knock-offs, all with relatively short runs. Trump, Humbug, Help! and a few others. It was when Elder and Kurtzman wrote a satire for Help! called "Goodman Beaver" they became noticed by more than just the comic book crowd. 'Beaver' was a visual parody of the Archie Comic Series, but the story content was a satire of a young magazine published name Hugh Hefner. "Goodman Goes Playboy" became the center of a lawsuit from Archie's lawyers, complaining of copyright infringement and that the storyline "undermined the valuable property my client has developed in these wholesome characters" and demanded the remaining copies be taken off the stands. Instead of fighting what was believed to be a weak case, Helps! publisher, James Warren reached a financial settlement with Archie and the matter was laid to rest.

That is, until Kurtzman and Elder used the story again for a Goodman compilation book sometime later, with serious visual alterations to the Archer characters by Elder so is not to confuse them as Archie-inspired figures. Despite these precautions, Archie threatened to sue again and, like the last time, Warren tried to negotiate and Archie ended up owning the story and the original artwork.

The great thing to come out of this adversity was Hefner LOVED the comic strip and liked is so much, he hired Elder and Kurtzman to create a strip for the pages of his Playboy Magazine, and in October of 1962, Little Annie Fanny debuted. Over the next 26 years, Elder and Kurtzman created 107 full, colorful, funny and beautifully detailed comic strips.