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Average customer rating:

The Most Potrzebie Book Ever!
Good, but lots of overlap with other collections
Hoo-ha! At Last:The Whole Furshlugginer Mess!
Excellent Art Book
An in-depth retrospective of the American satirist

Will Elder: The MAD Playboy of Art
Will Elder , and Daniel Clowes
Manufacturer: Fantagraphics Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1560975601

Book Description

The co-creator of MAD and Little Annie Fanny finally gets the career retrospective he deserves.

Will Elder is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of the second half of the 20th century. And one of the funniest. He is best known for his artistic partnership with Harvey Kurtzman on all their most highly visible collaborations throughout their careers: MAD magazine, Humbug, Goodman Beaver, Trump, and Little Annie Fanny. At long last, Elder is getting the book he so richly deserves: Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art, a gigantic coffee table book collecting his best work from more than a half a century of drawing and painting.

The book will reprint a representative sampling of the work well-known to aficionados, including stories from the original MAD comic, independent efforts from Humbug, Help!, and Trump magazines, and Little Annie Fanny pages reproduced from the original, painted artwork. Above and beyond the known is the relatively unknown, obscure, or unpublished work, such as pages and spreads from a variety of magazines in the '50s and '60s that Elder contributed to (such as Pageant and Saturday Evening Post), the infamous Norman Rockwell painting parody slated for the 3rd, unreleased issue of Trump, hysterical gag sketches, celebrity caricatures, oil paintings done for his family, and more.

The book includes commentary by Hugh Hefner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Terry Gilliam, William Stout, and Jerry Garcia, who describe the impact that Elder's work had on satire and comic at in the second half of 20th century America. Elder himself comments on individual pieces, and Daniel Clowes, the author of Ghost World, supplies the introduction.

Customer Reviews:

The Most Potrzebie Book Ever!.......2006-03-06

Just buy this already-- here's a book with great production values that features one of the great artists (of any kind!) of the 20th century, Villy Elder. "Genius" it says-- and for once it's fully justified. Comic genius, artistic genius, wiseass genius: Elder is the real thing.

Good, but lots of overlap with other collections.......2005-06-06

I'm not going to fault Daniel Clowes for including selections from Elder's work available elsewhere (MAD satires on "Gasoline Alley", "Archie", etc) or for NOT including the complete "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy," which is apparently under copyright limitations from the ARCHIE publishers (and is available elswhere on the 'net!) However I would have preferred more complete sequences from TRUMP and HUMBUG - which are not readily available elsewhere - and fewer examples of Elder's "straight" artwork - one still-life fruitbowl is plenty, thanks! How about more on the "A Night at the Castle" and "With trembling pseudopods" illos, which are in any event reproduced elsewhere?

Hoo-ha! At Last:The Whole Furshlugginer Mess!.......2005-03-11

This collection of Elder's work is a solid addition to what is already available. (The complete Mad comic book issues are available in paperback form at most bookstores, and the Little Annie Fanny series can be ordered from Amazon.) This volume contains much of Elder's work from Trump, Humbug and Help, as well as other magazines, like the 1950s Pageant.

Also included are many personal paintings and drawings of Elder's family, as well as landscapes.

A class clown in art school, Elder also assiduously studied such masters as Peter Breughel and Cezzane. In fact, he even gives homage to these painters in an illustrated series for Pageant, in which he discusses the artists which inspired him.

There is a lengthy essay by Bill Stoudt in which he describes the painstaking process by which Elder, Harvey Kurtzman and Hugh Hefner created each episode of the "Little Annie Fanny" series. Hefner insisted that each page resemble a painting, and that is precisely what Elder delivered. Only after numerous drafts, sketches and erasures was a page of "Annie" ready for print.

When commissioned to satirize Norman Rockwell, Elder decided to prepare for the work exactly as Rockwell would. He enlisted his neighbors to model for the characters in the painting, and the result was the hilarious "Visit to Grandma's" in which a wholesome American family is depicted feeding small animals to a Venus Fly-Trap plant.

You can look over the panels of "L'il Melvin" or "Howdy Dooit" and see something different each time. This is because Elder doted over each picture, cramming it with details, building one joke over the next. Thus it took hours - maybe days - to complete one page, but so what? It kept the kids in the 1950s laughing their butts off! (I know because I was one of them. We used to run around the playground, running like the characters in the "Starchie" parody with our knees up to our chins.)

But did he make money? Well, eventually, but he could have made a lot more. In 1956, Kurtzman and Elder left Mad to start their own humor magazine, Trump, financed by Hugh Hefner. Kurtzman had given an ultimatum to publisher William Gaines that he would remain with Mad only if he could retain 51% ownership. Gaines insisted on 49%, so Kurtzman quit. In retrospect, he should have stayed, because the magazine went on to make a fortune for Gaines. Trump, however, folded after two issues.

As other reviewers have suggested, Elder's work belongs not only the category of "comic books" but possibly to the world of art. Will Elder drew in the tradition of Breughel and Hogarth. He drew the Human Comedy. Ultimately, he held the mirror up to nature and found it all hilarious.

Excellent Art Book.......2004-06-17

Will Elder is one of the greatest artists in American history. Elder's works have appeared in magazines ranging from Mad to Playboy. Many of Elder's best works are parodies of such comic strips as Archie and Lil' Abner. Elder eventually became a full-time artist at Playboy Magazine and was one of Hugh Hefner's top assistants.

This is a must have book for all Will Elder fans.

An in-depth retrospective of the American satirist.......2004-04-04

Gary Groth and Greg Sadowski's Will Elder: Mad Playboy Of Art provides an in-depth retrospective of the American satirist known for his MAD comics. Will Elder packs in over a hundred pages of black and white and color illustrations from both popular and obscure magazines. The Goodman Beaver stories are reprinted for the first time in their original format, while paintings and sketches from Elder's other works document the personality and achievements of a zany artist.

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