Gahan Wilson is dead.
I'd make a joke about it, but nobody joked ever about Death as well as Gahan, or, I suspect, for as long.
His stepson describes him, in his death announcement, as "one of the very best cartoonists ever to pick up a pen" and he was.
He was a gentle, funny, charming man. One of the most perfect evenings I've ever had was the night that Peter Straub and Gahan Wilson and I wound up after an event in the little lobby bar at the Royalton Hotel, back when it was a Philippe Starck-designed place, and the three of us, in our uncomfortable tuxedos, talked about art and puppets and humour and horror and Sherlock Holmes and and what we were trying to make until late into the night.
Ten years ago, I had the honour of writing an introduction to Gahan's book, 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons.
This is what I wrote:
I got to reprint one of his short stories in the book Unnatural Creatures, a benefit book for the Washington DC literacy program 826 DC. It was not actually called
Here's the animated film I talk about above.
I'd make a joke about it, but nobody joked ever about Death as well as Gahan, or, I suspect, for as long.
His stepson describes him, in his death announcement, as "one of the very best cartoonists ever to pick up a pen" and he was.
He was a gentle, funny, charming man. One of the most perfect evenings I've ever had was the night that Peter Straub and Gahan Wilson and I wound up after an event in the little lobby bar at the Royalton Hotel, back when it was a Philippe Starck-designed place, and the three of us, in our uncomfortable tuxedos, talked about art and puppets and humour and horror and Sherlock Holmes and and what we were trying to make until late into the night.
Ten years ago, I had the honour of writing an introduction to Gahan's book, 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons.
This is what I wrote:
GAHAN WILSON INTRODUCTION
I have an embarrassing admission to
make: when I was a barely pubertal schoolboy I did not look at
Playboy for the articles. I did not actually care about the
articles. Interviews with American
politicians or movie stars left me unmoved, reviews of stereo
equipment or sports cars or cocktails meant nothing to me. No, I went
to Playboy for the
pictures.
I was
not old enough to buy it, nor brave enough to steal it, so each month
I would head into my High Street W.H. Smiths, and go up on tiptoes,
and reach up to and take Playboy down
from the topmost
shelf. Then I would slick through it as rapidly as possible, past
the Playboy Advisor,
past the naked ladies (pneumatic, terrifying creatures, quite unlike
the girls at local schools I would stare at awkwardly and with
longing when I passed them on the street), past the short stories
(even if I wanted to read them there would not be time before a shop
assistant spotted me), until I found it. It was always there: the
Gahan Wilson cartoon. And I would stare at it, at the strange,
squashed Plasticene-faced people, at the vampires and the people
building monsters, at the enormous aliens and raggedy mummies and
acts of unspeakable cruelty and nightmare (“What's the matter? Cat
got your tongue?” asked one spouse of another. And under the seat
was the cat, and it had.)
In a magazine
devoted to sex and aspirational lifestyle accoutrements, Gahan Wilson
was about something else – a cock-eyed, dangerously weird way of
looking at the world. Even when sex entered the picture it did so
strangely and awkwardly (Superman, his back to us, flashes an old
lady, who, unimpressed, retorts “You're not so super.” Vampires
view sleeping nubiles as snacks. Werewolves... ah, you'll find out.)
And,
strangely, the knowledge that each Playboy had
a Gahan Wilson cartoon in it somehow, for me, made Playboy
cool in a way that the cars and the cocktails never could, just as
the knowledge that Charles Addams was forbidden to draw the Addams
Family characters in the pages on the New Yorker
made that respectable magazine significantly less remarkable in my
eyes.
Over
the last two decades I have had the good fortune of encountering
Gahan Wilson in the flesh: initially, oddly, as a book reviewer who
said nice things about what I did. I wrote him a fan-letter, got a
wonderful letter back from him with a drawing of Mister Punch on it,
and finally got to spend time in his company at a variety of
conventions and meetings across America. Art Spiegelman and Francoise
Mouly teamed us up for their Little Lit book,
and I wrote a story for Gahan to draw that meant that I found myself
interviewed when they made a documentary about him (Born
Dead, Still Weird) and that the
comic we did was beautifully animated for the movie: it had ghouls in
it, and small children, and dead people, all of which traditionally
show up in Gahan Wilson's work.
In person, Gahan is
tall. His face might possibly have been made out of Plasticine, but
he is – and I doubt he will mind me telling you this –
significantly better looking than many of the people, some of the
monsters, and all of the aliens that he draws. He is, in person, a
funny man, not with the compulsive joke-making look-at-me funny of
comedians, but with a comfortably wry view of the world that he
communicates with ease. He is affable and intelligent. He does not
seem like a cartoonist – were I to pick a profession for him based
on his looks it would be that of successful small-town mortician, I
think, or owner of a backwoods motel. Or an alien, squished
uncomfortably into a Gahan Wilson-shaped humanoid body suit, here to
observe our ways and taste our wine and despoil our women.
He
operates in no tradition, although, on occasion I have seen people
and line in nineteenth Japanese prints and, in one case, a
five-hundred year old graffitied drawing of a monk and a dragon on
the side of a Chinese temple that I could have sworn were made by
Gahan Wilson's pen. He draws on horror movies, on popular culture, on
his own strange view of the world and of the permeability of language
– not punning, but playing with words and popular expressions in
ways that flex and stretch them, like a morbid poet. (“Is Nothing
sacred?” asked a man in a place where they worship Nothing. “How
are they selling?” is asked of a sad-looking man with piles and
piles of unsold hot cakes.)
Until
now it was hard to be a real fan of Gahan Wilson's Playboy
work. I do not read every issue
of Playboy, for a
start, and these days the magazine is too often sold wrapped in
plastic. And when Gahan Wilson's cartoons have been collected in the
past, the Playboy cartoons
were often black and white reproductions of the colour originals.
This book made me happy and excited when the publisher told me it
would exist, and it makes me happy and excited now – the idea of
getting to see the Gahan Wilson Playboy cartoons
as they were meant to have been seen, all of them collected together
chronologically is one that I find intrinsically wonderful. The world
is a better place for having this book in it. No kidding, no
hyperbole (well, maybe a little. But I mean it, so that makes it all
right).
I'll shut up now
and get out of the way. You have pictures to look at that will make
your world more interesting. I don't know if these cartoons will
taste the same without me having to do that nervous top-shelf dash.
Possibly they will be better.
I trust these
volumes will sell like hot cakes.
Neil Gaiman
They were cartoons like this...
although sometimes it's called (Inksplot).
Here's the animated film I talk about above.
It's a short film that was made for the documentary BORN DEAD, STILL WEIRD, as an adaptation of the short story we did together for Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman's IT WAS A DARK AND SILLY NIGHT book.
I really really liked Gahan. He was one of the people you admire before you meet them who live up to your expectations and hopes when you do. I'm deeply sorry he's gone.
It seems like last week that I bought a drawing from him, the cover art for a book I wrote with Gene Wolfe, A Walking Tour of the Shambles.
We used to talk (half-joking, but only half) about doing another volume of Little Walks For Sightseers, but 2019 took Gene and now it's taken Gahan, and I miss their conversations and I wouldn't want do it on my own.
Labels: Gahan Wilson