Remembering cartoonist Gahan Wilson

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We lost an incredibly talented cartoonist last year, Gahan Wilson. For more than 50 years, his twisted single-panel cartoons have appeared in magazines like Playboy and The New Yorker. His work always had this really distinct tone. Wilson's take on the macabre is loopy, dark and strange. There were monsters. Sometimes aliens. Maybe a pirate. To remember his life, his work and his impact we are revisiting Jesse's interview with Gahan from 2010. In it, he talked about the arc of his career and using childhood fears as inspiration. He also talked about his contributions to the National Lampoon.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:13.2	I'm Jesse Thorn, it's Bullseye.
0:23.0	Gaye and Wilson died this past November at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was a
0:28.3	cartoonist, one of the greatest single-panel cartoonists ever. For decades his work appeared
0:34.5	in the New Yorker and Playboy and it is impossible to miss, completely distinctive, dark, strange,
0:42.4	full of monsters and aliens and pirates grotesquery. There's a kind of perverse joy in laughing
0:50.7	at, say, when a guy's been turned into a giant shrimp and his wife asks if now he'll
0:56.1	finally see a doctor. I talked with Gaye and Wilson in 2010, almost a decade ago. I recorded
1:02.8	the show in my apartment in Koreatown here in Los Angeles and he breathed through full
1:09.1	of absolute vibrance, even then he was in his 80s. It's still one of my favorites. Let's
1:16.5	take a listen.
1:17.5	So I read that you and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that you got your taste for this
1:32.2	kind of, the world of the dark and gory reading pulp magazines. Is that actually true?
1:39.2	Well, I think I was there a long time before I got to be old enough to read pulp magazines.
1:46.2	I really don't know when it got started, but I was like spooky. That's back to when I
1:58.4	had some strange event, I suppose. But it just feels sort of cozy with it. I enjoyed
2:06.4	just enjoyed it. Even as a kid kid? Like as a six year older and eight year old? Yeah, it
2:13.4	was a Halloween certainly had a good deal to do with it. Halloween at that, one thing that's
2:21.6	happened, which I find extremely sad, is that Halloween used to be this marvelously unique
2:29.1	holiday in that it was strictly under the control of kids. And what would happen on Halloween
2:37.2	is the kids would put on these costumes or something that approximating a costume and
2:43.2	get their trick or treat apparatus. And then they would leave the house waving by by
	...

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