William Elder (born Wolf William Eisenberg; September 22, 1921 – May 15, 2008)[2] was an American illustrator and comic book artist who worked in numerous areas of commercial art but is best known for a frantically funny cartoon style that helped launch Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book in 1952.

"[3] Longtime Mad writer-cartoonist Al Jaffee called Elder "Absolutely brilliant... he was the star from the beginning.

In 2018, the Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon described Elder as "an amazing artist, a sneaky spot-holder on the top 20 of the 20th century".

[4] Born Wolf William Eisenberg in the Bronx, New York, Elder was known in his teen years as Wolfie.

At EC Comics, he inked Severin's pencils on stories for Weird Fantasy, Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat and other titles.

When Kurtzman created Mad in 1952, Elder's wacky panels, filled with background gags, immediately attracted attention, first with "Ganefs!"

Elder had a chameleon-like talent for mimicking the precise styles of other cartoonists, which made the satiric effect stronger.

"[7] Elder's rampant insertion of background gags set the tone for the comic book, quickly spreading into the panels of his fellow artists and imitators of Mad.

Kurtzman described their collaborative process: "I would write a story, and as if by magic, all the empty spaces would get filled in by sub-jokes... he was an inexhaustible source."

in 1954; the Mad piece was about a family and its meal, but the backgrounds were filled with numerous sight gags including the Bufferin aspirin ad campaign, hieroglyphics, a mop substituting for spaghetti, the RCA Victor dog, a toddler eating the plates, and a full coat rack including Viking helmet and deer antlers.

Monty Python's Terry Gilliam said of Elder, "I don't know if anybody's really worked at that level as intensely as Willy did.

Naturally every woman for miles around who had a son named Mike went out of their mind, seeing this mess of clothes and meat along the tracks...

"[11] Years later, Elder still had a gruesome side to his humor, sending his wife a heart from a slaughterhouse as a Valentine's Day gift.

For Help!, Elder and Kurtzman created Goodman Beaver, a well-meaning naif whose trust in human nature and goodness were forever being undercut.

One installment depicted the characters of Archie Comics as thoughtless hedonists, and was titled "Goodman Beaver Goes Playboy!".

When the full Goodman Beaver series was reprinted by Kitchen Sink Press, the story could not legally be included.

Publisher and critic Gary Groth wrote that Elder's artwork in the Goodman Beaver stories "clinched his reputation as the cartoon Brueghel [sic] with his intricate portraits of a world cheerfully going mad".

The Annie Fanny series (107 stories in all) was irregularly published in the back of Playboy for more than a quarter of a century from October 1962 through September 1988.