Chicken Fat

From the publisher:

Elder, one of comics' most fertile and wide-ranging imaginations, coined "chicken fat" to describe the myriad background gags crammed into his stories. This collection of drawings and illustrations covers his long career.

This companion volume to Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art peeks into the gray matter of one of comics' most fertile and wide-ranging imaginations. Elder coined the term "chicken fat" to describe the myriad background gags crammed into his stories for MAD, Panic, Humbug, Goodman Beaver and Little Annie Fanny: "It's the part of the chicken soup that is bad for you, yet gives the soup its delicious flavor," he once explained. Chicken Fat is a collection of flavors by a master comedic chef as he works out his recipes. This is a collection of sketches, drawings and a variety of obscure commercial illustration over the course of Elder's long career. Elder's stable of characters is duly represented, with Goodman Beaver, Little Annie Fanny, the Mole and the more obscure Anthony Adverse, together with caricatures of celebrities and politicians, studies of classic comics characters (including the iconic Wedding of Popeye and Olive Oyl), movie posters, assorted gag panels, anatomical and fine art studies, and pages upon pages of ingeniously realized doodles.