Acclaimed Horror/Comedy Artist Gahan Wilson Dies at 89
by Brian CroninNov 22, 2019

Gahan Wilson, the critically acclaimed longtime cartoonist best known for his offbeat cartoons that took a humorous look at horror situations, passed away this week at the age 89.

Over the years, Wilson drew cartoons for Playboy, The New Yorker, Collier's, Look and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Wilson's offbeat style took a while to get accepted by the magazine world. He explained on his website how he got his big break, ”My big break came when the cartoon editor for Colliers – who, like everybody else, thought the readers wouldn’t understand the cartoons I did – left to become the cartoon editor of Look. In the interim, the art director took over. Not being a trained cartoon editor, he did not realize my stuff was too much for the common man to comprehend, and he thought it was funny. I was flabbergasted and delighted when he started to buy it! He wasn’t in all that long, about a month and a half, but by that time my cartoons had started to appear. The guy who had gone to Look saw them in Colliers, and I guess a great dawning occurred, so he started buying them for Look, and that was it – I was now a big-time cartoonist! Absolutely foolish, but that’s the way it happened. That was the chink in the armor, and I just got through it."