Read comic: Chicken Fat

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.