Gahan Wilson

From the start, Gahan Wilson (1930-2019) was into the outlandish, ghoulish, and creepy, a circumstance he attributes, at least in part, to being “born dead” (or at least seemingly so:  he explained that anesthesia given to his mother caused a bit of scare until the delivering physician used “hot and cold water and slap, slap, slap,” until the infant Gahan coughed and sputtered to life). After serving in the Air Force and graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952, Gahan settled on a career as a cartoonist, but was initially met with a good deal of rejection.  Publishers explained that their readers just wouldn’t understand his macabre style.  His big break came by accident. “Collier’s started publishing me by mistake because the cartoon editor left and the new man didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to buy my stuff,” Gahan explained.  That broke the dam.  In time, Gahan’s work became a staple of Playboy, The New Yorker, Esquire, and National Lampoon. “Wilson was part of a select group of cartoonists who own their style, who deliver on paper what seems to be a good piece of themselves,” notes fellow New Yorker cartoonist, Michael Maslin.  New Yorker editor David Remnick agrees: “The really great [cartoonists] develop a private language, a set of characters, a set of expectations, a world. Gahan Wilson developed a world.”