The one thing I’ve held onto from my time in college was this piece of advice from one of my teachers. In film animation, the next person down the assembly line tries to improve on what came before. In television animation, the next person down the assembly line usually makes it worse. If you work in television like you’d work in film, you’ll never want for a job. I’m hard-pressed to imagine anyone in the history of comics who ‘upped’ his or her art as consistently or with as much energy as Will Elder. It’s obvious in his work that he had an almost inexhaustible joy for drawing, a passion that proves contagious every time I crack open an old copy of Mad Magazine and get that itch to fill a page with all sorts of ‘hilarious clutter’.

Thank you so much, Mr. Elder.