San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Underground comix virtuoso brought bikers, antihero to life
Back in the maximumoutrage years of underground comix in the 1970s, S. Clay Wilson was known for the Checkered Demon, a short and stubby antihero who wore checkered pants as he busted the heads of bikers, pirates and lowlifes, to the delight of readers of Zap, Yellow Dog, Arcade and other anthologies.
A uniquely San Francisco character and brilliant illustrator, Wilson had a long career using Dicks Bar in the Castro as his mailing address, message center and appointment place. Wilson outlasted Dicks, and he outlasted underground comix before finally dying, on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 7, at his home on 16th Street, half a block from the Dicks location.
His death was announced by his widow, Lorraine Chamberlain, in a series of rambling Facebook posts that began, “He’s gone. At 4 p.m. yesterday. I sat next to him all day yesterday, telling him stories ... one of arriving here in a crowd of topless women on Pride Day.”
Wilson had been bedridden for two years because of the lingering effects of a traumatic brain injury he suffered
after either a fall or a mugging while drunkenly walking home from a friend’s home on Nov. 1, 2008. At that time, he was found in the pouring rain, facedown between two parked cars. He came out of a coma after three weeks and drew comics for Zap while still in the hospital. He’d lost his capacity for clever dialogue but kept trying to draw until his cognitive skills declined. He was 79.
“Wilson was a oneofakind original guy,” said another oneofakinder, Ron Turner, publisher of Last Gasp Books and Comics. “Nobody could imitate him. What looked like a jumbled mess on the page was always a smoothly told tale.”
Many of these smoothly told tales comprise the “S. Clay Wilson Papers” at Columbia University in the city of New York. Acquired in 2018, the correspondence, ephemera and original drawings by Wilson are in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
“This comprehensive documentation of a specific artistic voyage, but also embodying an entire cultural ethos, is a visual map of the American cultural underground and of the influence that flowed between the comix, the Beats, the punks and the counterculture at large,” said Karen Green, curator of comics and cartoons at Columbia.
Steven Clay Wilson was born July 25, 1941, in Lincoln, Neb., where he grew up. His mother was a medical stenographer who brought home paper for Wilson to draw on. By age 14, he was creating complete comic stories of eight or 10 comic panels on the backside of a piece of typing paper. By 16, he had produced 1,000 of them, according to Patrick Rosenkranz, author of a threevolume series titled “The Mythology of S. Clay Wilson.”
“He would sit on his front porch after school and draw these things one after the other and throw them on the ground to pile up like autumn leaves,” Rosenkranz said.
Wilson majored in anthropology at the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1962. After a stint in the Army, he drifted to the Beat scene in Lawrence, Kan., where he developed a portfolio called “S. Clay Wilson Twenty Drawings,” which was published in an edition of 500. With that, he was on his way to San Francisco.
By then, underground comix had surfaced as a rebellion to the postwar Comics Code Authority, which regulated content for comics — loosely defined as images that tell a story in sequence. Starting in 1954, comics that met this standard were stamped on the outside with a seal.
Subversives like Wilson were naturally inspired to violate these standards in their comix (as opposed to comics) and get their 20 or 30page illustrated softbound stories out there. “Underground comix changed comics forever,” Rosenkranz said. “It made them for adults again.”
At the forefront was Zap, started by R. Crumb. This was what drew Wilson to San Francisco, in February 1968. He got an introduction to Crumb and that’s how the Checkered Demon made its way into Zap, No. 2, along with another Wilson strip — “Captain Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates.”
“Within a year, Wilson was known all over the world,” Rosenkranz said. Among his friends were Janis Joplin, William S. Burroughs and various Hells Angels. But his best friends were the bartenders, always for a limited time.
Wilson’s use of Dicks Bar was as much the process of elimination as it was convenience. “He’d already been 86ed out of every other bar,” wife Chamberlain said. “Dicks was the only place that would have him.”
She’d met Wilson in 1968 in a Seattle bar, and “it was love at first sight.” But one or the other was always encumbered, until 2000. “We’d been flirting for 30 years before we were both single at the same time,” she said. They moved in together and 10 years later were married at City Hall.
In addition to drawing for Zap, Wilson wrote “Bent,” “Checkered Demon Adventures,” “2” and “2 Squared.” A copy of original “S. Clay Wilson Twenty Drawings” sold recently for $6,000.
He also did album covers, book jackets, and illustrated punk and porn magazines. In his later years, he supported himself with private commissions, cash up front.
“Wilson will go down as one of the boldest cartoonists in art history,” Rosenkranz said. “He outdid all of his predecessors in his depiction of sexual deviation, mutilation and perversities of every stripe. But gallows humor was at the heart of all of it. There was something funny happening in the middle of the picture and you had to search to find it.”
A memorial is planned for after the pandemic. Survivors include his widow and a sister, Linda Schafer, of Cozad, Neb.