A guilty pleasure ... Gahan Wilson :)

A wonderful cartoonist died this week, Gahan Wilson, who was a guilty pleasure of yours truly for many many years. :)

We shook hands and then sat in silence. What to say to one of the masters of the macabre? I decided that it was better to say nothing; silence is sometimes an acceptable form of respect. At that time, Wilson was a star in three places: The New Yorker, Playboy, and National Lampoon, delivering covers, multi-panel series, and single-panel gags to those majestic peaks of the cartoon-publishing landscape. The title of a 2013 documentary about him, “Born Dead, Still Weird,” tells us a lot about the man and his work. Weird was his specialty—he thought that way, and he drew that way. Wilson was part of a select group of cartoonists who own their style, who deliver on paper what seems to be a good piece of themselves. It is a distinction shared by, to name just a few, Edward Koren, George Booth, and Roz Chast. The work is somehow inseparable from who they are, and that’s part of what makes it so memorable.

“I’d just as soon it wasn’t cut into those funny little pieces, if you don’t mind.”

Gahan Wilson, whose outlandish, often ghoulish cartoons added a bizarrely humorous touch to Playboy, The New Yorker, National Lampoon and other publications in the era when magazines propelled the cultural conversation, died on Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 89.

Gahan Wilson | RIP