Gahan Wilson

A few months ago, the news was dragged across my path that the cartoonist Gahan Wilson was in need of financial support since the passing of his wife and a decline in his health from Alzheimer's Disease.  Because we have the best medical system in the world, and because of the wonders of technology, it is now possible for people who are in need of serious and expensive medical care and/or their families to go online and beg strangers for money to pay their crippling medical bills.

Thank the gods we don't have the burdens of socialized medicine to put up with.  Why, would we even have crowdfunding technology if the nanny state did everything for us?

So I chipped in, just a little, because Gahan Wilson had a huge impact on my life, a pebble that caused great waves.  And got the news updates in my email, about how he was doing a little better, a little worse, how the appeals process was going re: getting funding from the state, how he was charming the staff, drawing a little when he could, all that kind of thing.  Which could be sad and could be heartwarming.  Gahan Wilson--

--spoiler--

--was just utterly fucking brilliant.

But I'll get back to that.  I will.  I hate that I have to.  But.

I think the first time I was aware of Wilson's work was in the center spread of a pretty good anthology of SF stories I got as a kid, Bug-Eyed Monsters edited by Pronzini and Malzberg (two guyz with zed-ful namez who edited a lot of really good anthologiez if recollection servez); this was a book that delivered exactly what was offered by the cover, short stories about that SF staple, the BEM, whether it was encountered on Earth or offworld, ate a city or was merely misunderstood.  Along with the short stories, the editors included (brilliant choice!) a middle section of maybe eight pages or so collecting that number of single-panel cartoons by Wilson, all related to the anthology's central theme.  They were great.  A quick search online didn't bring up any that I could nick and slip into this post, but my favorite featured a man and a hideous creature standing in front of a movie theatre covered in posters featuring the poor hideous thing's snarling face emblazoned over some lurid title about a menace from another world, and the human is saying to the monster something along the lines of, "I dunno, Larry, I think you need a better agent."  I smile just thinking about it.  I've probably blown the punchline, but you get the idea.

But that wasn't the pebble.  This was the pebble:

I don't remember how old I was, but I had a subscription to Twilight Zone magazine almost as soon as I knew such a fantastic phenomenal tailor-made for Eric thing existed.  This was a magazine nominally branded with the famous television screenwriter's most famous creation, and every issue did in fact include a teleplay from the original series, but what this really was, was a vehicle for was short stories, book reviews, movie reviews, and various other articles and interviews, originally edited by the brilliant and apparently reclusive T.E.D. Klein, all in the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres.

Wilson's role for the magazine was, of all things, that of their film critic.  I knew he did the cartoons from Bug-Eyed Monsters, but I was way too young to know he'd been doing similarly weird cartoons for Playboy, The New Yorker, and other magazines for decades.  So I knew he did cartoons, and I also knew he was a (pretty good!) film critic. And then in one issue of the magazine, suddenly he was a tabletop roleplaying game critic.

It might be helpful to know that at this point I had been playing Dungeons & Dragons for several years, since elementary school, matter-of-fact.  And by the time this magazine came out, I might have had a copy of Traveller, and it's not unpossible I had Star Frontiers though I'd have to look up some dates to see when that one came out.  But I had never heard of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu.  Not just that, though: despite already being a bit of a blooming fantasy and horror geek, I hadn't heard of Cthulhu.  I had heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but only because he was name-checked in a Ray Bradbury story, and that for the purposes of making a vaguely-lewd pun out of his name (a man wakes up in the future, discovering all the imaginative works of the 20th Century have been destroyed; he asks a librarian if they have any Lovecraft and she asks him if that's a book about sex, ba-dum-ting!).

Wilson, it turned out, was familiar with Lovecraft and Cthulhu, but not with tabletop RPGs.  The long and lovingly illustrated article he did for Twilight Zone, with the beautiful, goopy (and technically inaccurate re: the use of six-sided dice, but I'm a nerd) cover illustration, is about Wilson's quest to find a copy of the game and then to find a game, eventually leading him to gaming sessions with Andrew Chernak (then president of Grenadier Models, at the time the go-to source for tabletop gaming minis) and Robert M. Price (theologian, Lovecraft scholar, and fanzine editor of the old Crypt of Cthulhu).  It's a fun read.  You can hit it up at the link in the second sentence, to a scanned copy at the Internet Archive.

My mind was blown.

A horror RPG?  Where the players are taking on the roles of detectives and flappers in the 1920s?  In the 1920s?!, not some ancient realm of swords'n'sorcery or far-flung space opera setting?  The real world, sort of?  And you're going to track their mental damage, their "insanity" instead of merely number-crunching physical damage?  And the more they learn, the crazier they get?  And they can't even necessarily fight the monsters they face, because they'll go nuts or get et or both or worse?

Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.

I wanted the game.  And this posed a problem.  Because this was a game about an author I didn't know, hadn't read, and who wants to be the poseur playing something called "Call of Cthulhu" when you only have the vaguest idea what a Cthulhu might be?

It bears digressing, by the way, that this was the 1980s.  These days, everybody knows what Cthulhu is.  My mother-in-law knows what Cthulhu is.  Small children know what Cthulhu is.  You can get Cthulhu plushies, Cthulhu t-shirts, Cthulhu bumper stickers.  Every other game on Kickstarter is something-something-Cthulhu.  Yes, there's fucking Cthulhu Monopoly, of course there is.  But in the 1980s, Lovecraft was practically out of print.  That was about to change, with Arkham House reprinting several of their old anthologies of HPL's work under the editorial guidance of S.T. Joshi; the reason this was changing was partly Chaosium's publication of the Call of Cthulhu RPG we're talking about and partly the release of Stuart Gordon's cult hit Re-Animator, based on, get this, an obscure H.P. Lovecraft serial--that is to say, this was a hit movie based on a written work that at the time was considered relatively obscure amongst the corpus of an author whose work was largely out-of-print and only really known to a cognoscenti of horror writers who might still drop the occasional Easter Egg into a story or drum up a fond pastiche.

So I needed to read Lovecraft.  And happily, my public library had one of the new Arkham House reprints, and... the rest is personal history.  I now have an octopus on my left shoulder because I had an octopus holding my tie at my wedding, and my octopus at my wedding was a dual reference to I fucking love octopuses and also to that octopus-headed god emerging from his Pacific tomb to snack upon some poor bastards stumbling across his newly-risen lair.

O'course, at the time I didn't appreciate that Lovecraft was a racist son-of-a-bitch who was pretty awful even by the standards of his miserably racist era.  But Cthulhu--and that dubiously-named mythos--is a helluva lot bigger than the unpleasant bastard who imagined it.

And all because of Gahan Fucking Wilson.  I love that man.  He--

--spoiler again--

was the best.

You know why I'm writing this today, right?

Listen, though (or read): if you've seen Gahan Wilson's work, you know Gahan Wilson's work.  He was an original, with a distinctively loopy, ropy line that always managed to look so thoughtfully tossed-off.  There's scarcely a straight line in the foreground of a Wilson, as if he didn't care to learn how to draw them.  Everything looks casual and scrawled, and yet there's a funny elegance to it.  His characters are always gorpy lumps, wrinkled faces on top of disheveled bodies, all the proportions off; yet the cartoons are always certain and specific, you can tell exactly what it is you're supposed to be looking at, who's doing the talking if there's a punchline, what the joke is supposed to be.  And the joke is always something skewered and strange.

These are joys (clicking will embiggen):

Especially that eye doctor.  That's probably really happened, right?  Don't'cha just have to love that he's not a psychopath pretending to be an eye doctor?  He really is an eye doctor, just happens to be insane, is all.  And it's not like he didn't warn his victim.

The shitty thing about Alzheimer's and similar age-related degenerative diseases is, we'd already lost Gahan Wilson.  At least partly or mostly.  His family said he had good days when he was drawing and enjoying the presence of loved ones, but he wasn't always able to do those things, and of course he was also (doesn't get noticed as often) a fairly good writer and critic, and you can't do those things when your brain betrays you in the shadowy years.

But the latest update from his son Paul on Gahan's GoFundMe page is that we've lost him lost him.  He's passed away.  The rest of what hadn't already been taken away from us has been called for.

Oh gods, he was brilliant.  Just fantastic.  Just years of happiness anytime I came across a Gahan Wilson cartoon or stumbled over a piece of writing.  And I've been playing that silly RPG off and on for three-and-a-half decades (recently picked up the 7th Edition, which is pretty great), and I've read every short story (even the awfullest) and poem (even the worse-than-awfullest) HPL wrote and will still argue passionately about HPL as an epitome or archetype or avatar of the problematic artist, the creative who has left a legacy of important, influential, and affecting work despite being such an utter shit that you feel guilty endorsing their work.  All because of a magazine article Gahan Wilson wrote in 1985.

Wilson made the world better.  A little less miserable, a little weirder, a little funnier.  And he had a huge impact on my life for such a small and really obscure thing.  I don't owe him one, I owe him a multitude.  Goodbye, sir.  You were one of the greats.