Funny Pictures by Keil Charlie Goldmark Daniel & Charlie Keil

Author:Keil, Charlie, Goldmark, Daniel & Charlie Keil [Keil, Charlie, Goldmark, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2011-01-15T20:00:00+00:00

CHICKEN FAT

If Avery used the opera singer and the magician as comic stand-ins for the text’s struggle between norms and their disruptions, the aesthetics of early Mad magazine can be read through a more literal conflict, or at least competition, between the writer Harvey Kurtzman and the artist Will Elder for the attention of the reader. Elder liked to cram his panels with what he called “chicken fat,” extraneous gags and signs that pulled our attention from story actions in the foreground to seemingly irrelevant background details. As Elder explained, “chicken fat is the part of the soup that is bad for you, yet gives the soup its delicious pleasure.”13 For the most part these background gags were Elder’s own additions, not dictated by Kurtzman’s script, though some have suggested Kurtzman increasingly created opportunities for such elements. At other times the writer expressed frustration when these gags overwhelmed the basic building blocks of his narrative or upstaged his verbal humor. Readers would linger on a single panel, scanning for more comic elements rather than following the forward momentum of the plot.

One frequent form of “chicken fat” was advertising signs or graffiti, texts that often annotated the action or offered conflicting ideological perspectives on the events. Throughout Elder’s “Starchie,” background details hint at a much harsher social milieu than depicted in the Archie Andrews comic books. Yet Elder cannot resist putting a Burma Shave rhyme on the butts of a series of background figures in one panel (Fig. 8.1). A scene from “Shadow!” showing a young woman falling down a flight of stairs places a different advertising slogan on each step, while the natives in “Ping Pong” defend themselves with the Blue Shield Knights of Pythias icons, playing cards, Parcheesi boards, roulette wheels, and surf boards (Fig. 8.2). Such images need not be consistent from frame to frame, as in “Sooperdooperman,” where a different icon appears on the chests of battling caped crusaders in each panel, further undermining any conception of a coherent or consistent fictional world.

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