Way back in 1954 MAD lead off issue number 12 with a soon-to-be-classic parody of the comic book “Archie”, written by the late, inimitable Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by the late, incomparable Will Elder.

Kurtzman, as is well known, had some disagreements with MAD publisher Bill Gaines over pretty much everything and took his show on the road to the House of Hugh (Hefner, that is… AKA Playboy) to produce the short lived humor magazine Trump! which lasted only two wonderful but expensive-to-produce issues, and also included the likes of Will Elder. Harvey and Will stuck together with Humbug (11 issues, 1957-58), and later had one more shot at a humor magazine published by Warren Publishing called HELP!. HELP! lasted 26 issues from 1962 to 1966, and boasted a lot of talented contributors who went on to make or had made their mark in comics, humor and literature like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, John Cleese, Robert Crumb, Terry Gilliam, Jay Lynch, Gilbert Shelton, Gloria Steinem, Skip Williamson and Gahan Wilson.

One of the most infamous pieces to be published in HELP! was a story called “Goodman Goes Playboy!”, which was another parody of “Archie” by Kurtzman and Elder… sort of a sequel to their 1954 MAD effort and this time decidedly more racy. It featured their recurring character from HELP!, the straitlaced Goodman Beaver, who goes back to visit his old pals in “Riverdale” only to find the gang has changed… a lot.

I’m not sure if the publishers of Archie threatened or filed any lawsuits against MAD when they ran “Starchie” some 10 years earlier, but they were plenty unhappy about the swinging “Playboy Philosophy” being imprinted on their characters this time, and they called down the legal lightning upon HELP!, Kurtzman and Elder.

During Will Elder’s run on the ill-fated Help! Magazine — one of three such publications upon which Elder collaborated with Mad founder Harvey Kurtzman following the latter’s exodus from the magazine that made him famous — a story starring Kurtzman and Elder’s naïve leading man Goodman Beaver attracted the ire of Archie Comics for taking their signature characters and grafting Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” onto them. That story was “Goodman Goes Playboy,” and it resulted in waves of lawyers raining upon the strip’s creators, ultimately leading to Kurtzman and Elder handing the copyright to the story over to Archie and signing an agreement promising never to reproduce it again.- The Comics Journal

Interestingly enough it recently was discovered that the folks at Archie neglected to renew that copyright, so “Goodman Goes Playboy” is now in the public domain and was reprinted in The Comics Journal #262 and subsequently on the internet via TCJ’s blog. Here is the classic reproduced, click the pages for a closer look:

I’m busy working on a few jobs right now, but here are some tidbits from the last week of interest around the interwebby:

Who Blotches the Watchmen Dept.

Fox, that’s who.

On Christmas Eve Judge Gary Allen Feess issued a ruling in favor of Fox in the rights dispute case over the new Watchmen movie that is supposed to premiere on March 3rd. Fox alleged that they owned the rights to produce and distribute a Watchmen movie, and that producer Larry Gordon was breaking a contract between himself and Fox guaranteeing those rights by producing the Zack Synder film and distributing it through Warner Bros. Fanboys the world over are scribbling in their secret journals and preparing to don trench coats, lift-shoes and ink blot masks seeking retribution (that’s a Watchmen reference, for you non-geeks).

According to this article on EW.com, Feess doesn’t seem to think much of Gordon’s honesty. Fox was apparently able to prove they did contact Warner Bros. prior to the film’s production in an effort to settle the matter, but were ignored. Gordon claimed he was “unable to remember” his agreement with Fox.

As bad as this might seem for fans of the graphic novel like myself who have been waiting for decades for a movie to be made, the article linked above is right when it points out this is actually a good thing overall. It means that the courts still protect the copyrights of studios and honor agreements properly. It benefits no one when these things are trampled underfoot. Do not fear, Watchmen rubes… the movie will come out. There is too much money to be made for WB not to settle with Fox and get Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach and co. on the silver screen this winter.

A Gang of Idiots Grows in Brooklyn

Actually they were from the Bronx, but who’s counting? Check out this awesome picture from the New York Times Magazine article “The Lives They Lived”:

Picture from the VandenBergh/Elder Family

That’s Al Jaffee and Will Elder having lunch in the cafeteria of their high school in 1939. The picture was part of an article remembering the lives of some notable folks who passed on in 2008 (Will’s gone but Al is still kickin’!). Did the other kids in that cafeteria have any idea that sitting among them were two of the most brilliant and innovative creative geniuses the world of cartooning and visual humor would ever see? No, they thought they were weirdos… that’s why they are all by themselves. If I had a time machine one of my stops would definitely be that cafeteria to have lunch with those guys. If you want to blow your mind even further, it is very likely the guy taking that picture was Harvey Kurtzman, another high school pal. That’s THREE of the most brilliant and innovative creative geniuses the world of cartooning and visual humor would ever see, in case you are counting.

The Apple Falls Far from the Tree Dept.

Last week Apple announced that next month’s Macworld Conference & Expo, happening Jan. 5th -9th in San Fransisco, CA, will be the last one they participate in and that CEO Steve Jobs will not be doing a keynote address there. The annual San Fransisco event has been considered THE major Mac tradeshow and has been going on since 1985. Apple cites “reduced need to appear at trade shows” as the reason for the decision. Apple Insider reports that “sources within Apple claim the move is strictly a matter of de-emphasizing the event and not the sign of any health problems that would keep Jobs from presenting a keynote.”

Personally I think that stinks of spin and a very bad business decision.

First off, the spin: regardless of their decision to not appear in future shows, there are only two reasons Steve Jobs won’t be delivering a keynote address THIS year:

1. He can’t
2. He won’t.

I don’t buy the latter. Why won’t he? He doesn’t have a few hours one afternoon to pimp his company’s newest products at a major trade show? It’s not the travel… he LIVES in San Fransisco! It’s not the preparation… he’s got thousands of employees who could prepare the entire address for him (somehow I don’t think Steve does his own multimedia presentation work). Nope, it’s because he can’t. His health has been a question mark for some time. I think it’s obvious it’s worse than Apple wants to admit and he couldn’t do the address without revealing that. Really that is neither here nor there anyway. Someday Apple will have to do business without Steve Jobs as their figurehead… they might as well get started. Let the man scale back and retire if he’s having health issues.

Second, the bad business decision. Maybe they feel they no longer need to do trade shows, with the proliferation of their Apple Stores and online presence, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. What has set Apple apart from Microsoft and hardware companies like Dell, etc. is their clinging to the image of the small market, personal chic brand. Even as they keep getting bigger and bigger market share, and as they dominate some markets like personal music players and smartphones, they have still insisted they are the laid back and cooler little brother who has the personal touch. Their entire ad campaigns are built around this notion. Removing themselves from personal interaction like trade shows will reinforce the growing perception that they are becoming another soulless corporate monstrosity. Considering the prices they expect people to pay for their products in order to keep their glossy white Apple Stores afloat, they shouldn’t have any qualms about spending a few bucks to keep the little personal interaction they still have with the masses and taking advantage of the publicity and buzz that surround the announcements they make at these large shows. Hundreds of live bloggers and maybe hundreds of thousands of consumers watching live? You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

If Apple keeps going down this path, they will become like Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory, with wonderful toys rolling out of the factory but out of touch with the consumer, or at least the consumer feeling out of touch with them. You have to wonder just how long the toys will stay wonderful if that happens.

Well, not literally…. although with the spring we’ve had in Minnesota I wouldn’t bet against snow in June. I mean snowed under with jobs right now. I finished my MAD job but have two other major projects that are coming due right now so this week and next are going to be a continuation of the same old story.

I wanted to post my thoughts on the season finale of LOST, which I finally got to watch last night… but I really cannot justify that time right now. I just couldn’t bring myself to post the Dreaded Deadline Demon again today, so instead here is are a few links to some articles of interest:

Even More Will Elder-

This is one of the best Will Elder tributes I’ve read on the internet.

Chinese Copyright Infringement Book Debacle-

Here is an example of the power of the internet at work.

Illustrator Luc Latulippe and the folks at the Little Chimp Society discovered a few weeks ago that a Chinese publisher stole content off the LCS website, namely interviews with artists including Latulippe and the artwork included, and published it translated in book format selling for $100. No kidding… a full book of “scraped” content complete with their illustrations. You can read the story about it here and here.

Of course there is little legal recourse here. I doubt China, that bastion of the upholding of human rights, is even part of the Berne convention of international copyright law… but even if they are this publisher used fake contact info and a fake ISBN, so finding them at all is going to be tough, let alone getting them into a court somewhere. Basically there are some places on the planet where you can do nothing about someone stealing your work… I’ve run across my artwork produced on postage stamps from South American and former USSR republics before and have basically no legal recourse.

Contacting the distributors and sellers of the book also yielded no results, as they refused to stop selling it.

Well, Latulippe decided not to take this lying down, so he called for a grass roots “spread the word” campaign to let people know what this was about and hopefully damage the reputations of the parties involved or at least cause a few less sales for them. The good news is that it has yielded some results. At least one of the resellers, Index Books, has agreed to stop selling it and has sent the remaining copies back to the distributor. Hopefully more of such action will follow.

So, here is my contribution to the cause in the form of links to increase their search engine ranking. Good luck guys, and keep fighting the good fight.

Thanks to Cedric Honstadt for the heads up.

Mark Evanier posted a link to this short two part documentary on Will Elder, made by his son-in-law Gary VandenBergh some 8 years ago. It contains earlier footage of interviews with both Bill Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, among others. It’s well worth the twenty minutes, and I thought I’d share it here as well with a tip of the hat to Mark:

Artwork © E.C. Publications and MAD Magazine

Will Elder, one of the defining artists of the early MAD comic and long time collaborator of Harvey Kurtzman, passed away Thursday morning of unspecified causes at the age of 86. Elder had been ill for some time battling Parkinson’s disease and had difficulty signing his name let alone drawing, according to a communication I had recently with a friend of Will’s. It goes without saying that a true pioneer of cartooning left us yesterday.

All cartoonists get asked about who their major influences are, and among the usual suspects it sometimes surprises people when I name Will Elder near the top of my list. The reason for the surprise is that there is almost no similarity in my work and Elder’s… at least not on the surface. His influence for me was more about his humor and his approach to it. He used all manner of tools to create multiple layers of humor in everything he did. He could “sell the gag” like no other, making the written jokes funnier with his storytelling and imparting of the essential information in a way that rang clear with readers. He crammed his panels with multiple background gags and visual humor, some related to the story and some total non-sequiturs, that required readers to reread a story several times to make sure they didn’t miss any gags. That technique, coined the “Chicken Fat School of Art” (apparently so named because in the depression era chicken fat was added to many a dish to make it more filling) became a staple for MAD. More than anything, Elder just drew FUNNY. His drawings all by themselves could make you laugh. He had a way with expression, action and energy that created drawings that were just plain hilarious.

Elder was not only a master cartoonist but also a fantastic illustrator, and some of his best pieces for MAD were the parodies he did of famous magazine and other print ads that were expertly executed in various styles. He could draw anything, and it showed in the composition and layouts of even his more “simple” cartoons.

I often think of Elder’s work when I am laying out parodies or other cartoon art for MAD and other clients. I try to bring the multiple “Chicken Fat” layers of humor especially to my MAD work, but I also try and make my individual illustrations stand on their own in the funny department. If the image itself is funny, then it only makes the humor of the writing and story that much more effective. Elder wrote the book on that, and if I can one day be considered a pale shadow of his skill in cartooning, I will consider myself successful beyond measure.

There will be many, many tributes written on the internet in the comings days. I’d point you to this one by comic writer and blogger extraordinare Mark Evanier, who had the pleasure of interviewing Elder twice, I assume once being for his excellent book “MAD ART”. He also got to meet him in person, something I will never now be able to do. I’d also point you to this article from Journalista!, which has some great stories about Will as well as a lot of links to other tributes and sources of information about his life and work.

Coincidentally, my buddy Keelan Parham sent me this link a few days ago to an about to be released slipcase collection of the complete run of the rare HUMBUG Magazine, which features Elder and Kurtzman, as well as Jack Davis, Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth. A definite must for the bookcase.