Customer Reviews

Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles

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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.