Rork Glanf

ARTWORK BY WILL ELDER

Will Elder (the "Playboy of Art", 1921—2008) was an illustrator and comic book artist best known his contributions to Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comic book.

The following ink drawing is my favorite by Will Elder.

Over a period of several years, I have tried to track down the copyright owner of this drawing, and when and where it was originally published, with not much success. I contacted Will Elder (who has since, sadly, passed away), and he still had the original, but believed the copyright belongs to Playboy. I have written to Playboy several times, but (perhaps not surprisingly) have received no reply &mdash they are probably busy. Anyway, I scanned this image from a book called The Best Of Creative Computing, Volume 1 published circa 1980. It had the caption:

   "With trembling pseudopods,
   Rork Glanf tore away the Earth-Girl's space-suit"

This tied it in (rather loosely) to a not-very-good short story called "Time and Again, and Overtime". Obviously it was previously published in Creative Computing magazine (editor DAVE AHL).

The top star says "Flavor Buds" and the lower star says "Playhouse 90", neither reference meaning anything to me or anyone else I've spoken to about it.

Note from Tony Gleeson - May, 2008:
This illustration, and the story it accompanied, originally appeared in Trump, a short-lived humor magazine published by Hugh Hefner, edited by Harvey Kurtzman. A postscript to the story laughed that of course there was no half-naked space babe in the story, it was just to get you to read the thing.