Gahan Wilson | Biography

One of the most distinctive and original comic artists of our time, Gahan Wilson has established a secure reputation as a master of the macabre. "I've always had an innocent affection for the ghastly and the macabre," Wilson explained to Robert Dahlin of Publishers Weekly. This affection is obvious in his darkly humorous cartoons featuring monsters, aliens, vampires, and other grotesque characters. "Vile. Morbid. Depraved. Base. Monstrous. Diabolical. Grotesque. Macabre. All these adjectives and others like them have been quite properly applied to the cartoons [of] Gahan Wilson," a New York Times Book Review critic reported. "Wilson is the greatest cartoonist of the macabre in the world," Stanley Wiater proclaimed in an article posted at Wilson's Web site. Ray Olson in Booklist claimed: "Macabre cartoonist Wilson is the peer of Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, and Gary Larson, but he bests them all at simultaneously eliciting shivers and giggles." Wilson is also one of the founders of the annual World Fantasy Convention and designed the Convention's World Fantasy Award, a bust of supernatural horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Born Dead

Wilson has explained his passion for the strange and bizarre by saying that he was "born dead." Declared stillborn by the doctor who delivered him, the infant Wilson was plunged into a basin of ice water to revive him. "There must have been brain damage," Wilson once speculated. As a child, Wilson was a devoted reader of comic books, especially those artists with a wilder style, like Basil Wolverton. A predilection for the odd may have been hereditary: he had an uncle who was a professional lion tamer and includes legendary showman P. T. Barnum and populist politician William Jennings Bryan among his great-uncles.

During World War II, Wilson published his first cartoon in the journal of the Acme Steel Company, where his father worked as vice-president. The cartoon showed the German dictator Adolf Hitler and the Japanese dictator Tojo being horribly crushed by shovelfuls of the company's trademark steel. He went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago where he was, Wilson remembered, "the only admitted cartoonist in the whole place." After graduating in 1952, he sold a few cartoons to magazines by mail but soon determined that he had no chance in the field without personal contact. He had to make the rounds on Wednesdays when New York magazine editors regularly screen new cartoon artists, and so moved to New York.

Starving Artist in New York

In New York, Wilson began living the life of a starving bohemian artist in Greenwich Village. Although he sold enough work to support himself, he also met resistance to his highly original approach and subjects. He never made an effort to conform, and while editors were impressed with the rebellious young artist who held to his principles, they were reluctant to run his work for fear that readers would not understand it. It was only when the regular cartoon editor left the prominent national magazine Collier's and an art editor, Bill Chessman, took over temporarily that Wilson was finally discovered.

By the time Collier's folded in 1959, Wilson was selling to most of the major markets. By a fluke (he was looking for Harvey Kurtzman, editor of the magazine Trump), Wilson stumbled into the office of Playboy magazine. Publisher Hugh Hefner took him up at once, and Wilson's cartoons have appeared in the magazine ever since. Wilson's cartoons now routinely grace the pages of such leading magazines as the New Yorker, Boy's Life, Punch, Esquire, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Gourmet. He has also published collections of his cartoons and illustrated numerous books written by himself and others. Recently, he has also designed the computer game Gahan Wilson's the Ultimate Haunted House.

Wilson's cartoons, the rock on which his reputation rests most firmly, range from such conventional devices as the old-fashioned visual pun--a man introducing his ankle-high wife as his "little woman," or a member of a cult that worships an idol labeled "Nothing" asking another member, "Is nothing sacred""--to some of the most outlandish grotesques ever committed to paper. In some he issues strong political or social statements, as when the last surviving soldier in a total war exclaims amid the rubble, "I think I won!" But in almost all of his work the element of the bizarre predominates.

When speaking of influences on his work, Wilson admitted that the old New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams--creator of the Addams Family--is a favorite, as is Chester Gould of Dick Tracy fame (especially for his grotesque villain Pruneface), the medieval painter Heironymous Bosch, and Fontaine Fox's old comic strip Toonerville Trolley. He also credits classic film comedian W. C. Fields, whose loose, sloppy appearance Wilson tries to capture in his drawing style. That style--so easy to imitate, so deceptive in its seeming simplicity and tight inner control--is always the same regardless of which of the many magazines publishes his work. Only the content of the cartoons changes according to the readership of each magazine.

One of Wilson's most popular works has been the comic strip Nuts in the National Lampoon magazine. This strip features "the kid," not otherwise identified, and deals with his real-life problems, tribulations, and fears. Drawn in a style and perspective perfect for capturing a kid's eye-view of the world, the strip presents an unromanticized picture of childhood, recording the ignorance and credulity of that time. Wilson captures, too, the confusion of childhood, of learning and following rules set by adults that you really did not understand. Reviewing Nuts for the National Review, Joe Mysak explained that it is "about all the hopes and fears and nightmares of childhood, and why you're glad not to be a kid any more."

Critics have routinely praised Wilson's book illustrations. In a review for Science Fiction Review, Andrew M. Andrews found Wilson's book Is Nothing Sacred" to be "a fiesta of the grotesque and hilarious." A writer for the New York Times Book Review found that Wilson has a "diabolically fine, grotesque touch." In Gahan Wilson's America, Ralph Novak commented in People Weekly, "the unifying theme is that there's a monster of some sort lurking around nearly every corner." Occasionally Wilson tempers his approach, as with his illustrations for the children's anthology Spooky Stories for a Dark and Stormy Night; in this case "the inimitable Wilson's art . . . is playful rather than hair-raising," a Publishers Weekly critic related.

Wilson has sometimes ventured beyond illustrating to write stories displaying his trademark twisted humor and generally including his illustrations. Eddy Deco's Last Caper: An Illustrated Mystery, a parody of classic detective fiction that involves an invasion of space aliens, derives much of its appeal from Wilson's cartoons, in the opinion of New York Times Book Review contributor Bob Coleman. "Mr. Wilson is a wonderful cartoonist and illustrator, but his prose hardly dazzles. . . . Yet Mr. Wilson is playing a surprisingly interesting artistic game," Coleman observes. "'Eddy Deco's Last Caper' is not even an ordinary illustrated novel (in which illustrations complement the text) but one whose many pictures, forming an integral part of the narration, provide information unavailable verbally." The Cleft and Other Odd Tales consists of short fiction by Wilson, much of which first appeared in periodicals, and is "a collection of meticulously eccentric stories," according to Andrea Higbie in the New York Times Book Review. A Publishers Weekly commentator, noting that "an aptly odd original illustration" appears with each piece in this book, remarks that the "weird wit" of Wilson's stories "matches that of his drawings."