Mad #15: "Gasoline Valley!"

Download Mad #15

Inside many a serious illustrator there is a zany satirist waiting to break out. Will Elder was one such. After inking straight adventure stuff with penciler John Severin for Prize Comics Western and then various EC titles, he broke loose when his old high school buddy Harvey Kurtzman started Mad in 1952. "I was always a cut up," he once explained, "and I felt if I could expose this zaniness, this bottled up zaniness in me, I would really burst forth... Mad gave me a tremendous amount of license."

When Kurtzman and Mad parted company in the middle 1950s, Elder left, too. He worked with Kurtzman on his next three unsuccessful magazine—Trump, Humbug, and Help. In 1962 the two of them cooked up Little Annie Fanny for Playboy. Elder stuck with that project for well over a score of years.

Credits

Script: Harvey Kurtzman

Pencils: Will Elder

Inks: Will Elder

Colors: Marie Severin

Reprinted:

• in Mad Reader, The (Ballantine Books, 1954 series) #93.