Gahan Wilson (1930–2019)

Rating: however many stars there are

The Publisher Says: Gahan Wilson is probably best known for his macabre Playboy cartoons, filled with charming monsters, goofy mad scientists, and melting victims, and his cutting-edge work in the National Lampoon, but he’s also one of the most versatile cartoonists alive whose work has appeared in a wide range of media venues. Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics is Wilson’s assault from within: His little-known syndicated strip that appeared in America’s show more newspapers between 1974 an 1976. Readers must have been startled to find Wilson’s freaks, geeks, and weirdos nestled among family, funny-animal, and soap opera offerings. (The term “zombie strip” — a strip that has long outlived its original creator — takes on a whole new meaning in Wilson’s hands.)

While each strip, at first glance, appears to be a standard, color Sunday strip (albeit without panel borders), each Sunday Comic is a collection of one-panel gag cartoons, delineated in Wilson’s brilliantly controlled wiggly-but-sophisticated pen line. The last gag cartoon on each Sunday is part of a recurring series, either “Future Funnies” or “The Creep.” Some Sundays are a freewheeling mélange of board meetings, monsters, and cavemen (with cameos by Wilson’s Kid character from Nuts, his gimlet-eyed view of childhood, collected last year by Fantagraphics), while others riff on a topic or subject (clocks, plants, wallpaper, etc.). As is his wont, Wilson mines the blackest of black comedy in the banal horror of human nature. Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics collects, for the first time, each and every one of these strips, luxuriating across a 12” x 6” landscape format, with Fantagraphics’ trademark high production values, innovative design, and succinct historical commentary.

My Review:


What else need be said? It's Gahan Wilson, and it's either your kind of thing or it's not. It's very much my kind of thing.



I feel like these sofa-sitters about most of modern life. I don't get it. I feel like I have sixteen thumbs, mostly on my feet, and color-sensing seismographs instead of ears, in the rap-infested, reality-show-obsessed, Fox-as-news world I'm in. I don't fit, and I don't want to.



Goodness knows, there is no reason to assume it ever will, at least for very long. I keep slugging. Books like this, humor from 40 years ago, show me that there is in fact nothing new under the sun. Some people have always felt, as I do, that the world makes no sense, that up is in fact down, and the best we can do is cope.



I paint what I see. show less

I was born the year this book was published: 1965. Man had not yet been to the moon. Sometime in the early or mid 1970s I got this book for Christmas. It was a favorite immediately! I loved science fiction, and I loved humor, and like most any young child, I loved stories where the child-hero holds a position of importance. There is no telling how many times I re-read this light, fun story. Nothing too profound here, just entertainment.
Upon finding a copy in a used bookstore, I was delighted show more to relive a bit of my childhood. And unlike so many things that one relives from their childhood, this one held up! I enjoyed it yet again.
The citizens of the Moon are split. Some want to go to Earth and discover what is there. Others want to just blow it up because it's ugly and in the way.
Matthew Looney, a moonchild of unspecified age is selected to go on a mission to Earth. They land somewhere in the swamps of Florida near Cape Kennedy. I enjoyed once again seeing Matthew's delight and confusion at his first encounter with Earthlings (flamingos) and his commanding officer's more alarming encounter (alligators). I relished their horror when it begins to rain, and they are convinced the Earth people are attacking them with poisonous water-bullets. At this point, the expedition is so terrified, they take off to return to the moon, leaving Matthew behind (rather E.T. like). It is then up to Matthew Looney, moon boy, to save both the Earth and the Moon from annihilating each other. show less

The old National Lampoon magazine had two great strips that I thoroughly enjoyed: Shary Fleniken's "Trots and Bonnie" (which just cries out for a compilation book), and Gahan Wilson's "Nuts". The title is a bit of a take-off and homage to "Peanuts", but Schulz's strip, great as it was, was not really about children. "Nuts", however, is a memoir of childhood, pretty close to my era, and it is dead-on true to life and drop-dead funny (using the word "dead" twice here seems appropriate in show more describing Gahan Wilson's work). Some of these strips, I swear, were drawn by somebody who looked back through time to my own childhood, and others seem so familiar to me that they must be from some collective unconscious of childhood memory. show less

This is the first, and in many ways the finest collection of classic Gahan Wilson. His style may be related both to Charles Addams, who came before him at The New Yorker, or to Edward Gorey, who was more prone to books, or booklets as it were -- but Wilson is a true original. My favourite cartoon in this entire collection is not the title one, but a vignette where an elderly couple is seen aboard a train pulling into a station whose platform sign is "NOWHERE." The old woman nudges her show more partner: "We're here, dear!"

And so we are. show less