Interview with: Gahan Wilson
By Bridget LeRoy
Some people say they read Playboy for the interviews. But we know they're lying. They really read Playboy for Gahan Wilson's cartoons -- those sick, twisted, absolutely fascinating drawings depicting hellish man-eating monsters and other creatures paradoxically sandwiched between pages upon pages of airbrushed loveliness. At least, that's why I used to sneak looks at the Playboys kept in a box in a closet in my parents' room.
"I'm always pleased when I hear I've helped to warp a young mind," said the Sag Harbor resident, a descendent of both P.T. Barnum and William Jennings Bryan, when I informed him of this. "I'd always wanted to be a cartoonist," asserted Wilson, "and I was ghoulish before conscious recollection. I don't know why my parents didn't do something about it earlier on." After their deaths, while going through their papers, Wilson happened upon "a touching little stack of drawings I had done, pre-literate, just a wee babe. And my mother had written, no doubt upon my instruction, 'And a scary monster comes to destroy us all!'
"A lot of kids are creepy kids, and I was definitely a creepy kid," Wilson admitted with a boyish grin.
Upon attending the Art Institute in Chicago, Wilson honestly acknowledged that he was interested in being a cartoonist. "I think they took it very bravely," he said of the art school. The lucky fallout from being the only acknowledged cartoonist was that any calls the Institute receive for a cartoonist went directly to Gahan. "I would do little drawings at society bashes." He remembered being sent to some place in the stockyards, late at night, at a "horrendous joint, some bar. They sat me in a little booth, and these absolutely appalling people would come over, with scars, and broken noses, and so on, trying to cover up the warts and not get killed.
"But the thing was they couldn't have been nicer. I remember one guy, he was huge, and I was drawing him, in fear for my life. When I was done, he took the drawing in his monster hand, and he reached over and put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Kid . . . you stay wid' it!' I was so glad to be not dead, I just said something like, 'Thank you, sir, God bless you, sir.'"
Wilson headed east after a brief stay in the Air Force. "I lived in poverty in the Village, just barely surviving," he recalled. "Thank God there were a lot of magazines in those days that bought cartoons. I could unload, in obscure publications, just enough work to squeak by. You know, some knock-off version of Humping magazine, or whatever it was called, would buy something." But there was a misconception about the public that was rampant at most of the doors on which Wilson knocked. "A lot of editors would tell me they didn't think their readers would understand the cartoons, like there was some enormous gap between editorial intellect and the man on the street, which I find to be ridiculous. It's still going around too," he noted.
Wilson got his first break when an art director stepped in temporarily as the top cat at Look magazine, "and he didn't know enough to realize that people wouldn't understand my cartoons," Wilson remarked wryly. "He liked them, so he bought them."
What was the first cartoon Wilson ever sold? "I'll never forget," he reminisced. "The first cartoon I sold was to an outfit called Ziff-Davis. It was a good cartoon, and I got $8.50 for it. These were in the days where you sold your soul with your cartoon -- you know, all rights and all that. And for years I saw that same cartoon pop up in all kinds of different publications. "It was a snowy scene, winter, And there's a father and son, a teeny kid. And the kid is holding his father's hand, awwww!" Wilson made a "cute" noise, and laughed a wicked laugh. "The boy is pointing eagerly ahead, and in the foreground we see, on a mound of snow, a frozen bird with its feet up in the air. And the kid is saying to his father, 'Look, Daddy, look! The first robin!'"
How did Gahan hook up with Playboy in the first place? "It was very droll," Wilson remembered, "a fluke, although I believe we would have eventually gotten together anyway." "My parents lived in Chicago, and I would go and visit them every Christmas," Wilson continued. "I was living in Greenwich Village in the late '50s, early '60s." He had, at that point, achieved some modicum of success with his cartoons. "I had come across this wonderful magazine on the stands called Trump, which was a fancy version of Mad Magazine. I thought by gosh, this looks interesting, and the masthead said that the publisher was in Chicago. I called them and set up an appointment to show my portfolio when I got out to Chicago.
"So I turned up at this place on the North Side and said, 'Hello, I'm Gahan Wilson, I have an appointment to see the editors of Trump magazine.' 'Oh,' they told me, 'the offices for Trump are in New York City,'" Wilson laughed. "I was getting ready to leave, my face red with embarrassment, when someone came darting out of a door and said, 'Hef would like to see you.' So I said alright, having no idea what a Hef was. I followed this person up a staircase into this darkened room with only one light on a desk. There was this guy on the phone who smiled at me and made a motion for me to sit down.
"I'll never forget what he said to that person on the phone. He said he liked the story very much, that it was intelligent and all that, 'but the problem was it was anti-sin, and we're pro-sin.' Then he hung up, leaned over his desk, took my hand, and said, 'I've been waiting for you.' That's how I got started there."
Gahan Wilson also had a fairly long association with National Lampoon, running a monthly cartoon page called "Nuts," which focused on children and their beliefs. "It was a golden period there," said Wilson. Michael O'Donahue and Doug Kenney were still living, P.J. O'Rourke was still a Democrat. "It gave you a forum, for whatever you wanted to do. I'd say, 'I think I want to do this thing with dead bodies all over the place,' and the reaction would be 'Oh, swell!'
Although Wilson readily admits being influenced by Charles Addams, "'Nuts' was inspired visually by these Picassos in the Museum of Modern Art, these huge canvases of these little kids, these itsy-bitsy things just learning to walk. It got across this proportionate thing, how big everything is to these little human beings, and no one takes them seriously. It showed that growing up is almost an impossibility, this horrid challenge, and yet we meet it."
Author of 15 cartoon anthologies (including Still Weird and the soon-to-be-published Even Weirder), and quite a few other books, Wilson's output over the last four decades is enormous. Some of the works reside at the British Museum in London ("I had a show there") but there is, as yet, no Gahan Wilson repository. "I've had various offers, but I've never committed to anything," Wilson admitted.
Wilson has been heading out to California recently, for a very hush-hush project involving the Nickelodeon Channel. Could we soon be treated to "Nuts: The Series"? Let's hope so. And don't look under the bed.
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