Still Weird

by Gahan Wilson

A collection of zany cartoons from a successful artist for The New Yorker, The Addams Family and The Nightmare Before Christmas offers a humorous look at the horror that underlies daily human life.

Genres: Humor, Comic Strips, Cartoon, Comics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Gahan Wilson was an American author, cartoonist and illustrator known for his cartoons depicting horror-fantasy situations.

Wilson's cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style, and have a dark humor that is often compared to the work of The New Yorker cartoonist and Addams Family creator Charles Addams. But while both men sometimes feature vampires, graveyards and other traditional horror elements in their work, Addams's cartoons tended to be more gothic, reserved and old-fashioned, while Wilson's work is more contemporary, gross, and confrontational, featuring atomic mutants, subway monsters, and serial killers. It could be argued that Addams's work was probably meant to be funny without a lot of satirical intent, while Wilson often has a very specific point to make.

His cartoons and prose fiction have appeared regularly in Playboy, Collier's Weekly, The New Yorker and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. For the last he also wrote some movie and book reviews. He has been a movie review columnist for The Twilight Zone Magazine and a book critic for Realms of Fantasy magazine.

His comic strip Nuts, which appeared in National Lampoon, was a reaction against what he saw as the saccharine view of childhood in strips like Peanuts. His hero The Kid sees the world as a dark, dangerous and unfair place, but just occasionally a fun one too.

Wilson also wrote and illustrated a short story for Harlan Ellison's anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. The "title" is a black blob, and the story is about an ominous black blob that appears on the page, growing at an alarming rate, until... He has contributed short stories to other publications as well; "M1" and "The Zombie Butler" both appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and were reprinted in Gahan Wilson's Cracked Cosmos.

Additionally, Gahan Wilson created a computer game titled Gahan Wilson's The Ultimate Haunted House, in conjunction with Byron Preiss. The goal is to collect 13 keys in 13 hours from the 13 rooms of a house, by interacting in various ways with characters (such as a two-headed monster, a mad scientist, and a vampiress), objects, and the house itself.

He received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1981, and the National Cartoonist Society's Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

Gahan Wilson is the subject of a feature length documentary film, Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was tempted to give this collection one star, but in fairness to the talent of Gahan Wilson, I only based my rating on the delightfully macabre cartoons, and not on the terrible reproduction of them on display in this e-book. The cartoons are minuscule on my Kindle, and incredibly dark. Blowing them up only distorts and blurs them, so a great many of the jokes were impossible to read, if they relied on words that were in the image, as opposed to a caption below, and some of the images were mostly black blobs of ink, rendering them impenetrable. This is one of those "Shame on you for having the nerve to sell this" books. And on top of that, the author bio at the end has his name spelled "Ganan"......Just a disgrace all around.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gahan Wilson has the kind of sick, twisted mind that... well, it just appeals to me, that's all. Always has, for as long as I can remember... I remember running across his earlier but much slimmer I Paint What I See in the library when I was in elementary school, shortly after it was published in 1971.

This newer collection of some 400 cartoons showcases the bizarre imagination of someone who whistles happily past every graveyard he sees—not because they scare him but because they cheer him up. Gary Larson never got this dark. Charles Addams comes close, but even he was often too genteel. Wilson is the pure quill.

There are old favorites here, including my best-beloved Wilson cartoon of all time, the one also memorialized as an urban legend in the film "Gremlins" (and which also appears in I Paint What I See): "Well, we found out what's been clogging your chimney since last December, Miss Emmy."

There are also hundreds of other twisted creatures, ghoulish appetites and macabre situations, all illustrated in Wilson's distinctive style. Despite the sometimes muddy reproductions of Wilson's more detailed and painterly images, a flaw I hope was corrected in later editions of this compendium, I found Still Weird to be just as I'd hoped it would turn out—creepy and funny and still weird, as only Wilson knows how to be.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of his color cartoons just don’t translate well to black and white. But this is still an excellent and pretty comprehensive collection of his work at almost 300 pages, most of which have more than one cartoon.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.6

I watch for humor that focuses on science or reading and books. I found examples of both in this collection. (But he does like monsters, which aren't my type of humor.)

[Victoria & David Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is only one Charles Addams.
Wison is at best a talented wannabe.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a bit of a hodge podge of Gahan Wilson's comic/cartoon work, which has both its up side and its down side. On the up side, for instance, a pretty broad spectrum of things appears; on the down side, the style varies a bit weirdly thoughout, and sometimes the specific jokes are prone to hit-or-miss variability. As a long-time appreciator of his absurdist humor, this book served me well.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the surreal quality of many of the illustrations. The artist's full page panels, often involving strange and fantastical creatures, were by far the best.

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah, and only mildly humorous on occasion. Tries to be dark but he's not Addams.

[SpogNYC · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have any awareness of humor in your soul you will love this book and Gahan Wilson. If you don't have any awareness of humor in your soul, read this book and hopefully that problem is solved.