Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles [Paperback]

Will Elder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Elder was a primary creator of the gleefully rude, perennially adolescent, unaffected smart-aleck humor that would forever be thought of as the sensibility of American Youth. (David Hadju - The New York Times )

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (April 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560977043
• ISBN-13: 978-1560977049
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 8.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,162,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun Collection of Will Elder Sketches, April 27, 2009

By 

Andromeda "Palimino" - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles (Paperback)

This book prints a collection of Elder's rough sketches, gag panel submissions that weren't accepted, gift art for friends and family, commissions, comic strip roughs both pencilled and inked, painted and illustrated preliminary roughs for magazine articles, doodles, and other personal ephemera. I usually am not a fan of these types of books, but I love Will Elder, and he puts a lot more work into his sketches than most artists.

The work is done in graphite, inks, watercolor, colored inks and colored pencils, and is presented in chronological order, with detailed notes about the work and putting it into historical and biographical context. Even Elder's doodles and roughs are detailed and interesting. Many of the rejected gag panels are funny, and even the ones that don't quite work, are well drawn with that Elder air of whimsey. There is preliminary work for Playboy in the collection, so there is plenty of pin-up and good girl art, and, of course, Lil Annie Fannie.

The volume is thin, but the production values are very high, as is usual with a Fantagraphics book - the respect the publisher has for the artist, and the art of cartooning, is palpable. The scans are so high res that you can see crinkles in the paper of some of the doodle pages. The colors sparkle. The book is printed on a high quality matte bond, and Elder's linework shines thru beautifully, even on pencilled work. It's amazing the detail, the depth of field, the use of deep space, the detailed anatomy that Elder uses even in his sketches. I believe Fantagraphics meant this collection as a supplement to their coffee table book, Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art, and is well worth picking up at less than cover price.