the mythology of

THE MYTHOLOGY OF
S. CLAY WILSON
VOLUME 1 PATRICK ROSENKRANZ
PIRATES IN THE
HEARTLAND
PIRATES IN THE
HEARTLAND
Introduction
4
CHAPTER ONE
Wilson’s Childhood
10
CHAPTER TWO
Higher Education
60
CHAPTER THREE
Lawrence, Kansas
138
CHAPTER FOUR
The Barbary Coast
174
I’ve always been digging pirates because
what could be more opposite from a
Nebraska cornfield than the fucking
Caribbean with the bloodthirsty pirates
boarding a big fat Spanish ship full of loot.
I always hankered for the ocean. It’s just
a fantasy, a childhood fantasy. What kid
didn’t want to play pirates, gangsters, or
cowboys and Indians? Surrounded by all
those cornfields and shit is why I moved
to San Francisco to be next to the water.
Absolute fantasy and other worldliness. To
escape the confines of Bible Belt Nebraska
and cornfields. That is one of the reasons
I draw pirates even to this very day.
— S. CLAY WILSON
JOHN WILLIAM WILSON AND IONE LYDIA LEWIS
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met in Fremont, Nebraska, when they both worked at
the Pathfinder Hotel, and married in 1935 in Cozad,
Nebraska. They moved to Lincoln and bought a small
white bungalow with red shutters at 1730 North Twenty-Ninth Street, near Clinton School, where they raised
their two children—Steven “Steve” Clay, born July 1941,
and his sister, Linda Lee, who arrived in November 1946.
It was all very sedate—a Great Plains family in the
bosom of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s postwar prosperity,
where Middle American values were stressed, education and industry were encouraged, and manners
were appreciated. Both parents worked to support the
family, and the kids were expected to earn good grades
at school and help around the house. They took vacations at a lake cabin in Minnesota for several summers,
WILSON’S
CHILDHOO
and the kids had a series of pets: dogs, cats, and Mabel
the Parrot.
“We did have a quite normal childhood. We were
well fed, well cared for, and very loved,” said Linda.
“My parents were not strict disciplinarians, and we
were never beaten or anything. My dad commanded
our respect, and we gave it to him. They were hardworking middle-class folks that had children later in
life. Mom was thirty-one when Steve was born and
thirty-six when I was born. Dad was six years older
than her.”
John Wilson was a master machinist who worked
for the Sidles Company in Lincoln for many years, and
later at the University of Nebraska. He also had his
own small workshop in the backyard, said Steve. “He
ran a steel lathe and he could make anything, including crossbows which would punch a hole through
solid marine plywood—THOK! He made furniture.
He made fuel pumps for Offenhausers. He was a whiz
woodcrafter, steel lathe operator, and mechanic.”
Their mother worked for a time as a waitress at
the Coney Island Café, but eventually she went back
to school to learn a better trade and became a medical
stenographer for orthopedic surgeon Doctor Phil Getscher. She also worked as a typist at the state mental
hospital. “Mom worked as a medical stenographer in
Lincoln, Nebraska’s state insane asylum,” said Steve.
“She was a little nutty herself. A real intense woman,
God rest her soul. She was a whiz with algebra. She
was very smart, though neurotic and weird. She’d get
real upset; she was kind of nervous, and I take after
her. I’m nervous all the time, and kind of depressed,
off and on, just like Ma.”
“Most definitely Steven inherited my mother’s nervous personality. I was the easygoing one and took after
our dad,” said Linda. Her brother got very excited about
holidays and parties, she recalled, especially Christmas
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and birthdays. “There was one Christmas, when I was
three or four, when I got up and opened everybody’s
presents before everybody got up. He was very pissed.
I can still remember that. He was yelling and crying.
‘You ruined it. You ruined it.’ When he became unglued
he was quite a motor mouth.”
Their mom’s parents and grandparents were Midwestern farmers, but their dad came from the Blue
Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the oldest of nine children born to Samuel James Wilson and Stella Mae (née
Epperson) Wilson. In later years Steve often alluded
to his hillbilly ancestors and to the lore and language
they passed down to him. “Maybe I got my craftiness
from Pa, some oblique path. ’Cause when I’m working
sometimes with a magnifying glass, I remember seeing
my pa doing real detailed work with micrometers. I was
always fascinated, and I wish I’d learned the steel lathe.
He was always waiting for me to ask him, ‘please teach
me how to run the steel lathe’ but, I don’t know, there’s
some kind of friction between the son and the father.”
“Steve was my mother’s favored child, but I apparently was my father’s favored child,” said Linda. “I think
he was disappointed that Steve didn’t play baseball or
throw footballs or go fishing. I was like my dad’s son.
I was the one who went fishing with Dad and all this.
Steve wanted to hang around with his friends and do
stuff like that. He separated himself from the family
activities a lot. I was kind of Dad’s buddy and remember
sneaking out of bed to watch some wrestling matches
with Dad—he loved it! Mom was already in bed, so I was
able to do this. He liked the company, I think.”
“Pa got me a .410 shotgun, and going pheasant-hunting with my hillbilly father was a pleasant
memory,” said Steve. “I always felt real bonded. There
was no talking. It was just silent walking and stalking.
Then I shot this bunny, and wait a minute. I don’t want
to do this. It’s when I quit hunting, disappointing my
father. Pheasants are one thing, but this bunny was
blown apart. There was nothing left to eat—BLAM!”
“I thought of one of Dad’s stories,” said Linda. “My
dad had five sisters, and he said his mom used to make
dresses from flour sacks for them that said ‘Mother’s
Best’ on their butts. I’m not sure if it’s true, but Dad
loved to tell that story.”
“And my uncle—Pa’s brother—Eli, he had his own
flea market in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in a railroad terminal covered with vintage circus posters and honeycombed with used guns, coins, antiques, and all kinds
of amazing stuff,” said Steve. “He had one son who was
a rock ’n’ roll star. Everybody liked Mike because he
‘sounded just like a nigger’ when he sang. His brother
was a gay male nurse, who had a palomino horse with
a silver saddle and bridle; and when the horse died,
they had him stuffed and had the horse with all the
gear in the living room. I got my collecting gene from
Uncle Eli. He would sell me any weapon. I had fucking
12
Civil War cavalry sabers, matching flintlock pistols,
percussion stuff, and war clubs from the Fiji Islands.
We played guns with real guns. Once I had to make a
sandwich, and my cousin Mike said, ‘Here’s a knife.’
It was a Luftwaffe dagger for cutting up the hot dogs.”
“I remember playing Monopoly with Steve,” said
Linda. “He was five and a half years older than me and
always had Boardwalk and Park Place loaded with hotels,
just waiting for me to land there. I remember defeat
bringing me to tears on more than one occasion. We
also enjoyed playing Scrabble with Mom. She was great.
She used many medical terms because of her profession.
Way back in the early days, my folks would have him
watch me if they wanted to go out for an evening, and
he’d make me read his cartoons over and over. By that
time he was like twelve and I was like seven.”
Drawing was something he always did, he said.
He once asked his mother when they were going to
get a TV set like the neighbors down the street. She
threw him a pencil and told him to make his own
pictures. This suggestion to use his own imagination
encouraged him to create his own art rather than wait
passively to be entertained. He drew greeting cards for
birthdays and holidays, and designed coupon books
for household chores as presents to be redeemed by
his parents. He and his friends sketched out large
tableaux of adventures and battles on big rolls of colored paper they rescued from the trash bins behind
the local paper mill. Eventually he began to create
fictional characters who appeared again and again in
his stories. Linda became his focus group. “She used
to be my proofreader, my sister, and she used to give
me her input on them,” he said. “She used to tell me if
they were funny or not.”
The inspiration that propelled him into the
medium of funny books came thanks to his uncle Millard Townsend, who ran a drugstore in Ponca, Nebraska. When Townsend visited Lincoln, he brought along
unsold magazines and comic books from his store with
the covers ripped off; the covers were sent back to the
distributors for credit. Steve’s first encounter with the
EC comic book Piracy was his Damascus moment, and
like Paul the Apostle, he was knocked for a loop. His
desire to be a comic artist flamed on.
“The EC Comics were pivotal to me. When I saw my
first EC Comic it was—dare I use the word nirvana or
some kind of point of enlightenment—but when I saw
that it blew my mind. My first one I remember distinctly was Reed Crandall’s ‘Blackbeard.’ I was going, fuck,
what the hell is this? Here are these glorious comic
strips done by all these different artists, all done in
different styles. That built a fire in me and that’s what
I was going to be. That’s my story and I’m sticking to
it and I’m going to be a fucking cartoonist. I’m going
to be one of these guys. That’s when I really decided
for sure to start to become a cartoonist. So I started
13
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practicing, like practicing the piano, except a lot of
people don’t want to practice the piano. They want
to play the piano, but I wanted to be a cartoonist so I
started drawing half a century ago, which is what I did.
It’s piled up.”
He drew nearly every day at or after school and often
on weekends and vacations, filling one page after another with pencil drawings on both sides, working right up
to the edge of the sheet. “I compulsively began to draw
comic strips on pieces of typing paper of an elaborate
fantasy world populated by my own cartoon characters: pirates, space warriors, soldiers, and little, twin,
stunted vampire brothers named Ivan and Igor. These
early characters were the predecessors of my later
underground comix characters. During high school I
became exposed to the work of Aubrey Beardsley, who
has influenced my work heavily. I loved the sensual,
art nouveau, calligraphic line quality and Orientalinfluenced, patterned composition of his work.”
His mother encouraged his interest in drawing, but
she could recognize obsession when she saw it. “I’d
be drawing on the front porch on summer days, and
they’d be laying around like autumn leaves. I’d draw
one and throw it on the floor, draw another one and
throw it on the floor. I was like a machine. Ma would
say, ‘Would you do something with these comic strips?’
and sweep them off the porch.” He gathered them up
and stacked them neatly in a footlocker near his bed.
“I was drawing all these black-and-white ones just
to practice story line. They all have a moral, and they
all have a beginning, middle, and end, and they’re all
individual stories, and they’re all individually dated and
titled, with a title on one side and a strip on the other.
I had different categories, so there’s [characters like]
Kipton the Space Hero, and George and Sam McKuen,
who were a detective team. There [were series like]
War and its Men, Screech and Scowl, [and] a horror series
[starring] Percy Puss and George. There’s a couple, Ivan
and Igor, which were vampire bats, which are a kind of
genesis from George, the squat little dog, with his little
ears, and they turn into horns. So Ivan and Igor were
twin brother vampire bats and the direct genesis of
the Checkered Demon. Then there’s lots of pirate stuff
because I was really flipped out with Piracy comics.”
He tried out different genres—science fiction, action/
adventure, horror, monster—even funny animals. In one
14
strip, George the Dog thinks he’s an artist, and Percy
Puss pays for the dog’s dissatisfactions. Many stories
are revenge fantasies or mayhem caused by frustration. One can only imagine what was on the mind of
young Steve Wilson when he came home from school
on January 26, 1956, and drew the story of Bloody
Berg, who locks his own troops in a dungeon with
man-eating rats.
“It was something I did that I enjoyed doing. I’m
going to draw comic strips because nobody bugs me
when I’m drawing comic strips. Maybe one of these
days I’ll become a fucking cartoonist and make a living
at it, which I am.” This series of hundreds of comic
pages have at least one glaring omission. There are
no girls in them. “I didn’t know any girls to draw,” he
said. “It was just men being evil to men. There were
no women in them at all. Of course everybody is real
horny when your sap is rising. I just took it out in
having people kill each other. You don’t have to have a
shrink analyzing why I did this.”
Wilson attended Lincoln High School, where he
met his lifelong friend Don “Ace” Williams. “We were
in the same art class together and he was always seeking attention back then,” said Williams. “He was very
funny and we got to talking somehow and we struck
up a little friendship. The first time we got together
outside of school I went over to his place after school.
I think he wanted to show me some of his artwork
and some other things he had there in his basement
room. Back then a lot of houses had basements back
in the Midwest and most of the kids had a room in the
basement, as did I, so we went down to his room and
he showed me this footlocker at the foot of his bed,
this old chest. He opened it up and it was filled with
single-page comic strips in pencil that he’d been doing
since he was a little kid. We were going through those
and they were all really funny and clever, and so that
was my first impression of Wilson.”
“In high school, I liked to draw,” said Wilson. “I
was drawing, drawing, drawing. I was obsessed with
chess and drawing. I was a recluse, drawing comic
strips compulsively. So I was called a squirrel, which,
at the time, meant egghead or geek. I hated everybody
except for Ace, who I still see, and his now-dead brother, Muth, my Army buddy—and himself a brilliant
artist. We were alienated and Beat. We wanted to be
beatniks. Like, hey, man, let’s, like, fall down by the
Zoo Bar and, you know, whatever, you know.”
“After school he’d come over to my place sometimes,” said Williams. “We’d sit around and listen to
cool jazz records—at least we thought they were cool.
He would drink his tea. He would drink these exotic
teas, like these smoky, rich Chinese teas. I was a cigarette smoker back then and I got into kind of an affected habit of smoking imported cigarettes. I thought
that made me look cool and arty. I would show him
15
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my latest pack of cigarettes that I got at the tobacco
shop, some strange brand from who knows where,
and he would admire that, and he’d show me his latest
teas. Then we’d play some Gerry Mulligan jazz records.
Maybe it was in college he turned me on to this guy
Kenneth Patchen who was a poet and made a recording of his poetry accompanied by jazz and we thought
that was really hip. We’d do stuff like that, and we’d
draw sometimes.
“We both had bicycles in high school. Not too many
people had cars back then, but we had bicycles. We
would get together on the weekends and ride our
bikes. He had this beautiful Raleigh bicycle that I was
very envious of that was kind of the top of the line
back then, with gears and everything. It was a Dutch
bike. I’d never seen anything like it. It was kind of an
odd-looking frame and very narrow handlebars and
you had to ride on it very upright. It was called a Magneet. I thought that was just so cool.
“We’d also go out into the country sometimes. He
had some kind of realistic toy guns and we’d play Army
with a bunch of guys and go out and run around in the
countryside and use these toy guns.”
Ace’s older brother Muth and his friends Jerry Jacoby
and Clair Morgan also liked to draw comics, which Steve
and Ace discovered by snooping. Steve said, “These
were the older guys in high school. I was drawing my
shit and they were drawing their stuff, except their
drawings were more fetish and mind-blowing. These
guys were also hip to EC but they had their own styles,
and they were doing these jam session drawings of real
bizarre shit, sexual stuff. They were kind of secretive
about them.
“They had these characters like the Jack Off Machine
that Clair Morgan did, and they passed these things
back and forth. This guy is sitting in a chair and he’s
got the machine to jerk him off and he’s adding oil and
the arm is going putt putt putt putt and then he ran
out of oil to lubricate the machine stroking his dick. ‘I
can’t turn it off. I can’t turn it off.’ It jerked him off to
the point where, when he turned off the machine, his
dick was like a burnt matchstick and the end of his dick
fell off.
“I went, ‘wow, this is even weirder than the EC
guys,’ but it had a different kind of style, really arty
shit, you know.”
At school Wilson was often called upon to draw
posters for school events and illustrations for the high
school literary magazine, the Scribe. He was shy around
girls, especially the exotic-looking Latvian girls whose
families had moved to Lincoln. “In high school, nobody
ever got laid, but everybody fought,” Wilson said.
“When I was fourteen, James Mosely, who was black,
insulted my mother in art class. So I had to be macho
and we started to get into a fight. Like if you’re in jail,
you have to show heart. So I had to fight Mosely.”
16
They postponed their showdown until after school;
they agreed to meet in the boy’s room. “It was a Friday
night, and I wanted to get the fight over because I was
buying my pet parrot from a sailor back in Nebraska.
I was really looking forward to getting Mabel the
Parrot because that was the closest I could get to
being a pirate. So I thought, ‘Fight Mosely. Get it out
of the way. And if you live, you can buy the parrot
for dessert.’
“So anyway, we meet in the bathroom. I hit him as
hard as I could. I only got one chance. I hit him as hard
as I could and it really pissed him off, because he was
not as tender and delicate as your humble narrator. He
pretty much kicked my ass. Okay, now I can relax, put
my nose back in shape, and buy this fucking parrot.”
He got his parrot, but the fight led to unexpected
consequences.
“This guy tells me, you were crazy to fight Mosely,
because he’s a Junior Golden Gloves champion, which
I didn’t know. I was a piece of candy to him. Anyway,
I blew that off and didn’t think anything about it.
But then people were still fucking with me. They
were real redneck assholes. Then out of nowhere,
which was my proudest moment in high school, this
guy was going, ‘Wilson, you creep, turn around, you
Neanderthal motherfucker. I’m going to kick your
ass,’ and then, Don Posey, who was a track star in
Nebraska, a black jock athlete, stood up and pointed
at the guy and said, ‘if you’re fucking with Wilson,
you’re fucking with us.’
“To this very day, I get kind of a chill. I had this
whole fucking black cadre behind me, because I
showed heart and fought Mosely, and I’m a fucking
squirrel. I’m more of a minority than they are. So fuck
all of you. It was my best moment in high school.”
Mabel remained a longtime member of the Wilson
family after Steve left home. She lived with them for
more than forty years. She had bright red and green
feathers and could talk a bit, said Linda. “My dad was
just crazy about Mabel. She had these funny little idiosyncrasies. Mabel and my dad were very close.” In 1983
Mabel surprised everyone by laying an egg. The local
paper sent out a reporter to cover the story.
“My husband found the egg when he was
cleaning up Mabel’s cage,” Mrs. Wilson said.
“She’d been acting strange, and hiding under a
newspaper, and there was her egg.”
The egg is infertile, but it is quite an accomplishment since quite often parrots in captivity
do not lay eggs. And it solves a mystery for the
Wilsons.
“We call the parrot Mabel, but we weren’t
sure the name was appropriate until we found
the egg,” Mrs. Wilson confided. †
21
!"#$%&'()*+
“HE PRETTY MUCH
KICKED MY ASS.
OKAY, NOW I CAN
RELAX, PUT MY
NOSE BACK IN
SHAPE, AND BUY
THIS FUCKING
PARROT.”
Unlike many of his colleagues, Wilson made his underground debut in Zap Comix
rather than newspapers; but after that, numerous tabloids, including Gothic
Blimp Works in New York and the San Francisco Good Times, welcomed his work.
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28
“Boogie Boogie Horror Yarn” from Laugh in the Dark, 1971.
54
55
“Boogie Boogie Horror Yarn” from Laugh in the Dark, 1971.
“Whip Tip Tales” from San Francisco Comic Book #1, 1970.
56
57
“Whip Tip Tales” from San Francisco Comic Book #1, 1970.
“Whip Tip Tales” from San Francisco Comic Book #1, 1970.
58