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.
My all time favorite is included in this one: two worried-looking scientists wearing lab coats and holding clipboards are standing next to a flight simulator with a large full moon on the view screen above the control console. A rabid-looking werewolf is sitting in the command chair wearing an ill-fitting space suit. The caption redas: "I'm afraid this simulator test indicates that Commander Brent would be a poor choice for the Lunar Expedition." This is a collection of cartoons that I never tire of leafing through.
Some of these are black and white printings of color pieces that work better in color. One which I ran across in the collection for the first time – a shark in the bathtub - is very effective in black and white. Gahan does such effective things with negative narrative space.
Stupid, ugly, witty - enduring and endearing, these homely humans have it all. I Paint What I See is a great collection of single frame comics/cartoons. I really like the look of the more detailed pieces but the mostly minimalistic approach exudes a sort of dynamic haste. It’s not meticulous, it’s messy and in today’s airbrushed, auto-tuned, AI-generated world this style is so refreshing.
i'm very into cartoons moreso than comics. I do like comics (sequential art to be nerdily precise), it's just that my heart still belongs to the one panel gag geniuses like gahan w., charles adams, george price, george booth, larson, &cet. gahan is the beez kneez. ghastly humor is my poison.
Why didn't I love this? Perhaps these would be best as stand alone posters, to let the dark flat stare simmer in you, and not let there be the chance that you'd read these quickly or pass through them looking for a laugh. I did love the dedication and the last page.