Since the Lord is reportedly present throughout creation, it stands to reason that he pervades the World Wide Web. And lo, His cyber-prophet has emerged in Maine.

The Church of Blow emerged a few months ago, and has issued more than 30 video-sermons to its growing flock. They all feature a young man in a purple robe decorated with green hearts. He has a Biblical beard and a bug-eyed look. “Hi, I’m Reverend Cornelius Blow,” he lightly drawls. “I have had a vision... I was instructed: ‘Cornelius, it’s time to start a church... on YouTube.’” Eagle-eyed fans of local theater may have already identified the RevCorBlow (“that’s my hip-hop name”) as Jeremiah McDonald, who has graced Portland-area stages with his laser-sharp comic timing. McDonald is also a filmmaker who has embraced the Web as a way to hone his craft while finding an audience.

Click title heading at top to hear jazz and blues on Concertzender.

Will Elder, one of the great funnymen of the 20th Century, died on Thursday. He could draw anything and make it funny. He took whatever Harvey Kurtzman came up with and carried it one step further.

How influential was Will Elder? Even film directors took a cue from him. In Louis Malle's Zazie dans le métro (1960) one scene is an Elder-style situation translated to live-action comedy with background action upstaging the foreground. Psychology Today once ran an illustration homage to Elder's memorable "Mole!" (Mad #2). In the 1950s, when other comic book publishers attempted to duplicate the success of Mad by spewing forth such titles as Wild, Crazy, Eh! and Madhouse, they focused on Elder's panels and had their cartoonists do chaotic backgrounds filled with silly signs and bad puns. But that only made it clear that they did not see funny the way Elder did.

"Restaurant!" is from Mad #16 (October 1954). When you click on the splash panel to expand it to immense size, amazing details are revealed, and you can also see that he did not cheat. Almost every character has an extreme action or gag. A dog and an open mouth hint at the RCA Victor trademark. Two characters imitate the Kilroy nose pose, famed from WWII when the UK's Chad character was joined with the signature of Quincy, Massachusetts shipyard inspector J.J. Kilroy. Stanley Link's Ching Chow stands framed in the doorway (not unlike being framed by panel borders). On the wall is a giant ad for Bufferin. A woman wears a teapot on her head. The fan blows a man's false teeth from his mouth. Almost like a puzzle, the guy in the pink shirt conceals the scissors he used to clip the girl's hair ribbon to make his tie. The reader becomes aware of panels within panels and stories within stories.

To Elder it was only logical that Terry Lee and Pat Ryan from Terry and the Pirates would go to a Chinese restaurant in the comic book world. And in a real life restaurant, Elder once stood at the cash register and pulled lettuce from his wallet. What those other comic book publishers failed to understand was that Elder viewed life itself as the true theater of the absurd.

Curiously, most of the obits and tributes over the past few days make little or no mention of the superb work the team of Elder and John Severin did in the early 1950s with Severin penciling and Elder inking on stories for EC's two war comics (Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales) and EC's science fiction, notably on two Ray Bradbury stories, "The Million Year Picnic" (Weird Fantasy 21, September 1953) and "King of the Grey Spaces" (Weird Fantasy 19, May 1953).

For more on Elder, take a look at Eddie Hunter's Chicken Fat, a blog named after one of Elder's familiar running gags. For more on Elder's influence, see the journal of William Stout and the Vancouver Art Gallery. The New York Times carried his obituary, "Will Elder, Cartoonist of Satiric Gifts and Overpopulated Scenes, Dies at 86," by William Grimes on Sunday.

On last page of "The Raven" (Mad 9), note the panel five lettering error which ignored the balloon stem, prompting an additional error of stem covered by color.

This is a scene from Purple Noon (1960), adapted from Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. Below is the scene recreated for an advertising campaign by the South Korean firm Polham.

From 1942 to 1948, Highsmith scripted for comic books. She talks about her work for comic book publishers in this 1987 interview. Having left the field, she got in a nice jab at the comics world in The Talented Mr. Ripley when Ripley phones comic book artist Frederick Reddington (pages 14-16): "Tom had a hunch about Reddington. He was a comic-book artist. He probably didn't know whether he was coming or going."