Cartoonist a master of the macabre
Creepy art often in New Yorker, Playboy
A cartoonist whose work haunted the pages of Playboy, the New Yorker and National Lampoon for decades, Gahan Wilson died Nov. 21 in Scottsdale, Ariz., from dementia. He was 89.
Wilson had a distinctive drawing style. Childhood fears came to life, surrealistic monsters lurked around every corner and every prognosis was grim.
His first published cartoon, from 1954, depicted a boy and his father in a blizzard. The boy points at the frozen corpse of a bird, its feet and beak poking out of the snow, and says, “Look, Daddy, the first robin.”
In a 1968 cartoon that typified Wilson’s humour, a couple walks down a street. The husband’s head resembles a shrimp with tentacles.
“Harry,” the woman says, “I really think you ought to go to the doctor.”
Wilson said in 1989 that “I see a cartoon as a kind of mini-short story. If it’s any good, you see with no effort what led up to this episode, and what’s probably going to happen after.”
Another cartoon features sweet childhood toys in an attic, but then a one-armed teddy bear says: “One day when he’s old and feeble, he’ll be in a nostalgic mood, and he’ll come see us again … and then we’ll get him!”
New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin wrote on the magazine’s website that “Wilson’s art is both the heart-thumping you feel when you dare look under the bed and the relieved inner laugh you let loose after he’s scared the pants off you.”
Gahan Allen Wilson was born Feb. 18, 1930, in Evanston, Ill.
“I was declared stillborn. My mother had been given too heavy an anesthetic and I had turned blue,” he said. “The old family physician doused me in a bowl of hot water and then in ice water. From the first, I knew it was tough out here.”
Wilson began drawing at an early age, graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952, then moved to New York. His wife of 52 years, writer Nancy Winters, died in March.
One prototypical Wilson cartoon, from 1964, showed a skeleton in a Santa suit lying crumpled in a fireplace.
“Well,” a worker tells a wide-eyed matron, “we found out what’s been clogging your chimney since December.” Wilson said “that got more angry mail than anything I ever did.”