Will Elder - His Mad World - NYTimes.com

Will Elder - b. 1921 - His Mad World - The Lives They Lived - Obituaries - NYTimes.com: "’Twas a week before Christmas in 1953 when the artwork of Will Elder stirred the attorney general of Massachusetts to ban a comic-book adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s treasured piece of holiday piffle, “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The outlawed comic, titled Panic, was a spinoff of Mad, the wild and wildly successful year-old magazine for 14-year-old minds. Panic’s crime was having published Moore’s much-reprinted public-domain text, verbatim, to the accompaniment of outrageous, incongruous, stream-of-consciousness illustrations by Elder. None of the four-legged creatures that Elder drew in the opening panels were stirring, because all of them were dead — half-butchered carcasses of hogs, a goat, a baby elephant, a lion and the requisite mouse, all dangling from meat hooks, gushing blood. One of the animals, a small lamb, was still alive but stewed — that is, drunk from guzzling moonshine out of a jug nestled between its hooves. The sugarplums dancing in the children’s heads were Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and when the narrator of the tale settled down for his nap, he did so with a tall iced nightcap and six bottles of hooch scattered around his bed, alongside a sexy mama kerchiefed like a belly dancer."