GAHAN WILSON

L
egendary cartoonist
Gahan Wilson talks to
FM about his creepy
creations, his creative
process, his nostalgic
influences, and the surprises
that lurk in the dark recesses
of his labyrinthian mind.
Whimsical Creep:
Inside the Unquiet Mind of
GAHAN WILSON
by David Weiner
His artwork is the stuff of fantasy; from
the ironies of daily life to weird, foreboding,
and at times nightmarish scenarios, Gahan
Wilson’s eerie cartoons are punctuated by
brilliant, insightful observations that cut to
the truth of the matter—and always manage
to be fun. Yet Wilson himself is a man of
contradictions: if you met him in line at
the local coffee shop, oblivious to what
he does for a living, you’d be absolutely
shocked to discover the downright creepy
nature of his work. Genial, soft-spoken,
and modest when talking about his life
and occupation; his warm, welcoming
demeanor easily lulls you into a false sense
of security, distracting from the monsters
that lurk within his psyche.
“It’s a nice imagination game, and it’s
sort of an oddball frolic that your mind
goes into,” says Wilson of the twisted
wellspring that serves his creations. “You
combine humor with bizarre extremes.”
Filled with monsters, aliens, serial
killers, mythical creatures, corporate
creeps, and creepy crawlies, the legendary
cartoonist’s work has haunted the pages
of Playboy and The New Yorker for the
past five decades. He’s also been a regular
contributor to Collier’s, The Saturday
Evening Post, National Lampoon, and
other “odd” periodicals. No surprise that
Wilson is a big fan of FM. “Oh, decidedly,”
he beams. “I love Famous Monsters. I love
to browse the thing, and it’s always got
something that opens my eyes to some fact.
It’s just fun, a pleasure.”
Recurring themes imbued in Wilson’s
macabre bag of tricks include famous
monsters portrayed as regular folks, longdead corpses that bystanders may or may not
notice, grotesque creatures hiding behind
human puppets, ironic suicides, industrial
accidents, environmental catastrophes,
UFO invasions, world destruction, heavyhanded bosses, corporate anonymity,
commercialism, gentrification, and the
triumph of the mundane.
Talking to us from his home in Sag
Harbor, NY; Wilson, now 84, was happy
to provide a glimpse—via an old, creaky
trap door, perhaps?—into the creative
maelstrom swirling his brain. “It comes
naturally,” he says with modest simplicity.
“That spooky thing amused me. [My
cartoons are] rather touching, too, because
it’s all about vulnerability, and the images
are, in a funny way, a kindly kind of
amusement.”
So where does all that dark whimsy stem
from? A true nostalgic sort, Wilson gets a
twinkle in his eye when he thinks about his
Depression-era childhood and formative
years. “I read Weird Tales, and so on… I
was inclined from the get-go to fantasies,
and I loved pulp magazines and that kind
of stuff, and the movies,” he says. “I didn’t
see actual horror movies as a wee child,
but I took to them when I was able to see
the darn things, and enjoyed them from
the start. I’m quite a movie buff, and I just
adore the classics of that marvelous Karloff/
Lugosi period. They were swell movies.
They still are swell movies. I remember
realizing I was rather affectionate towards
the Frankenstein Monster, and realized
later on that it was because these people
[who crafted the movie] were skillful.
[FRANKENSTEIN] is a marvelous fable.”
The classic creatures and characters that
populated those “swell movies” regularly
inhabit Wilson’s work, albeit with a twist.
Frankenstein’s Monster becomes the
equivalent of a stray dog picked up by
enthusiastic trick-or-treaters, only to be
rebuffed by their parents: “I don’t care if
he did follow you home—you can’t keep
him.” Dracula sprinkles a shaker of salt
with delight on the neck of his next victim,
or shudders with fear outside of a movie
theater showing “VON HELSING,” his
family recoiling in horror at the poster that
promises a stake-wielding “Fiend Who
Comes at Dawn”. A portrait artist bristles
with anticipation of the full moon so he can
finish his painting of The Wolf Man.
Reflecting on how he initially chose to
pursue such left-of-center subject matter
that still connects with the veracity of the
moment, he observes, “As you get older,
you get wiser, and you learn about what’s
actually happening in real life. It connects
with the creations, as with any art. I think
I was pretty much slanted; I liked the
fantastic feel, and I enjoyed the spooky
stuff. I felt very comfortable and had fun
with it. It’s got a nice, rather touching
history to it all.”
Wilson grew up in Evanston, IL, a
densely populated suburban landscape just
north of downtown Chicago. A college town
(it’s home to Northwestern University)
peacefully perched on the shores of Lake
Michigan, the clean and slightly timeless
location provided a pleasant Midwest
foundation for the artist. “My father
worked for this big business company and
did really well, got higher and higher and
so on. I look back on it with pleasure,”
he recalls. “We lived in an apartment
building, one of those middle-class kind
of operations. It had just ordinary, middleclass folk, and lots of kids, so we played
kid fantasy games, which they still do. I get
a little teary-eyed sometimes, seeing them
run around, doing some fantasizing.”
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • jan/feb 2015
63
was difficult finding the markets
that allowed a bizarre humor,” he
explains. “I did Saturday Evening
Post cartoons sort of as a sideline,
and Collier’s allowed me to sneak
in a large number of pretty far-out
notions. I did manage to get some
very odd cartoons in markets
which you would think were not
likely. It was flexible, and it keeps
changing. But I did find [the right
magazines], and it just sort of
grew, and I felt comfortable with
doing them. And then Playboy
was marvelous, because I could
do whatever.”
Like a sea captain standing
behind two fisherman, peeling
off his mask to reveal a
terrifying, gilled creature out for
revenge; a ghoul with webbed
hands waving to his newborn in
the nursery—who waves back
with its own tiny webbed digits;
an open elevator which, upon
second look, is actually a toothy
monster looking to chomp its
next passenger; and that thing
clogging the chimney? Turns out
to be the mummified corpse of
Santa Claus.
Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner,
himself a failed cartoonist, was
an early champion of Wilson’s.
An active cartoon editor, he
That boundless, stream-of-consciousness
imagination of childhood—and its
accompanying fears and phobias—have
proven to be fertile ground for Wilson’s
cartoons. “As a child, you always have
these bizarre little games that you play,”
he starts. “As you get older, you alter, and
when you’re with kids, it’s fun [to observe].
They’re darling and they’re stimulating, and
they teach you a lot. Being with children is
very instructive about being with people,
because they’re more unfiltered.”
Wilson loved to doodle and draw on paper
and in the margins of notebooks as far back
as he can remember, and he worked hard to
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hone his craft in an academic setting. “As
time went on, I got more and more involved
with [drawing], and then solidified it after
high school by going to The Art Institute of
Chicago, which was, and is, a marvelous
institution,” he says. “I did a little teaching
there briefly, and I enjoyed that too.”
Inspired by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe,
H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes, the ghoulish cartoons
of Charles Addams, and daily comic strips
such as Chester Gould’s DICK TRACY,
George Herriman’s KRAZY KAT, and
Charles Schultz’s PEANUTS, Wilson
ultimately determined that single-panel
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • jan/feb 2015
cartoons best served his eccentric style. “I
gravitated to the panel magazine cartoon
thing pretty much because I liked just
composing the picture, and you could work
a vein of humor which was more advanced
with cartoon magazines [such as Playboy
and The New Yorker].”
The odd and unusual can be an acquired
taste, which Wilson quickly realized, so he
didn’t go full steam ahead with the weird
at first because he had a hard time finding
the proper, receptive outlets to publish
him. “When I began with the cartoon stuff
in magazines, Collier’s and so on, I’d get
by with an occasional bizarre thing, but it
rarely altered Wilson’s work, save for a little
idea here or suggested flourish there that he
encouraged the artist to expand upon. The
colorful, full-page Gahan Wilson cartoon
has been a consistent staple in Playboy
ever since the late ’50s and long after the
centerfold staple disappeared, and remains
a must-see highlight of the men’s magazine
format, whether it’s the first thing a reader
looks for or saved for a post-Playmate snack.
The ultimate Gahan Wilson completist
can also find every cartoon created for
the monthly in the heavy, three-volume
collection GAHAN WILSON: FIFTY
YEARS OF PLAYBOY CARTOONS, from
Fantagraphics Books.
Sitting at his drawing table, Wilson
wisely tailors his work for the proper
audience; while The New Yorker caters
to readers with a more highbrow sense of
humor; Playboy’s audience is obviously a
little racier—sophisticated, yet sexy. “It’s
a market thing,” says Wilson. “When you
do something for a market, or anything, be
it cartoons or short stories or whatever, it
has to fit the market. You keep that mind. It
would be silly if you didn’t. It’s like going
to a party; you behave accordingly.” And Wilson feels like working for a
magazine can be a social endeavor. While
cartooning is mainly a solitary profession,
Wilson points out, “You’re part of the group,
and that’s one of the very pleasant aspects
of it, because you’re working with other
talented people, and they’re very worthy of
your attention. You can have a swell time.”
He also recognizes that his work has a huge
fan base, which gathers “an interesting
crowd,” and he seems to get a kick out of it. While dutifully cranking out monthly
doses of the odd and absurd for popular
publications, Wilson also explored the
awkwardness, fears, and foibles of
childhood with his celebrated NUTS comic
strip in National Lampoon magazine. While
very much its own entity—probing how
the young brain makes sense of the world
around it—the strip was also a response
to the sugar-coated travails of Charlie
Brown, Snoopy, and the gang, which often
explored the psychology of adults using a
canvas of kids. Wilson also penned reviews,
short stories, the hard-boiled detective
parody EDDY DECO’S LAST CAPER:
AN ILLUSTRATED MYSTERY, and
the children’s books THE BANG BANG
FAMILY and two-book series HARRY THE
FAT BEAR SPY and HARRY AND THE
SEA SERPENT, which draw on the cloak-
and-dagger fun and gadgetry of the James
Bond movies—a franchise that Wilson
is quite fond of. “Loved them; they were
swell. I read Fleming. It was marvelous. It’s
a great, creative area.”
Wilson also produced a popular video
game in the early ’90s, GAHAN WILSON’S
THE ULTIMATE HAUNTED HOUSE,
which he found to be a thrilling departure
from the norm for him. Like a hyperinteractive Gahan Wilson cartoon come to
life, the game requires users to obtain 13
keys to 13 rooms, inviting them to tinker,
poke and play with the various characters,
creatures, and spooky settings as they make
their way against the clock through the
maze-like setting. “It’s a new experience,
and it’s fun to play different things, because
it enhances everything,” he says. “The more
adventurous you are, the better you do.”
Had he not found such resounding
success as a cartoonist, Wilson tells FM
he would have enjoyed working in radio,
which he’s dabbled with, or stepping
into the spotlight for plays or movies. He
was the subject of the 2013 documentary
feature GAHAN WILSON: BORN DEAD,
STILL WEIRD; the directorial debut of
Hollywood producer Steven-Charles Jaffe,
and found it to be a positive experience.
That BORN DEAD reference is a nod to
the fact that Wilson arrived in the world
stillborn, or so the doctors declared, and
was revived when thrown into a tub of ice
water—an auspicious debut that clearly
would help shape his macabre mindset.
In 2005, Wilson was recognized by the
National Cartoonists Society with their
Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement
Award, and he received the World Fantasy
Lifetime Achievement Award (a bust of H.P.
Lovecraft, which he designed himself) that
same year. Still prolific in his eighth decade
of spins around the sun with no songs of
slowing down, Wilson delivers multiple
submissions to The New Yorker and Playboy
each month for our amusement. “I’m a very fortunate fellow, because I
really enjoy doing this stuff,” he concludes.
“It’s like a party—it is a party. Each
magazine is a celebration, and you behave
accordingly—you try to be a good guest.”
Even if that guest is standing quietly in the
corner putting poison in the punch.
Playboy full-color cartoons courtesy of
Fantagraphics Books. B&W cartoons
courtesy of The New Yorker.
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FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • jan/feb 2015