“Little, Wrinkled
and Green”:
an interview with
the macabre
cartoonist
Gahan Wilson
By Dale Andrew White
..
Copyright 1982 Dale Andrew White
This article originally appeared in
the magazine Ampersand.
..
(1980) - A fat lady with her dog stands in front of the Evanshire Drug Store, chatting with a gentleman who has just purchased cigarettes and a newspaper. She glances down the block at the opening of an alley, from which emerges a little boy heavily bundled in cap and coat.
“Here comes that Wilson boy,” she comments, “all alone, as usual.”
Although the Wilson boy appears to be quite alone to her, around him are lurid creatures of his imagination - a cloaked ghoul, a prehistoric bird, a monster with tentacles. The images saunter along like faithful puppies.
The fat lady, the drug store, the man with the cigarettes, the boy and his imaginary friends are all parts of a Gahan Wilson cartoon - one of numerous drawings in his 1978 collection “And Then We’ll Get Him.”
What makes the picture so frighteningly funny is its element of truth. Wilson grew up in Evanston, Ill., (not quite Evanshire, but close) and, though he was not truly considered an odd fellow, he did seclude himself (with the assistance of his trusty pencil) in a world of demonic and hideous characters.
..
A painter rendering a tree on his canvas with an assortment of nonexistent spiders and serpents in another of Wilson’s comics explains to a curious little girl: “I paint what I see, child.”
And that’s exactly what Gahan Wilson does. His sense of humor is amazingly perverse, shiveringly morbid. He finds something to laugh about in all sorts of wicked and uncommon things: hospital patients connected to IVs, hanging judges, mad scientists, fallen angels, emotionless business executives, man-eating plants.
“Well, I always wanted to be a cartoonist,” Wilson says. His voice on the telephone is deep, even and precise - as if Vincent Price were reciting a favorite line of Poe. “Forever and ever. At my mom’s place recently she came across something that I once did. It was a comic book with stuff similar to what I do now - monsters, rockets, that sort of thing. There were balloons over the characters’ heads. And instead of words in the balloons there were just scrawls. It was sort of pre-literate. I tried commercial schools but I found them to be very superficial. I wanted someone to teach me to draw as well as I could. I knew no one could teach me to be funny. I was the only cartoonist who was admitted at the Institute (Art Institute of Chicago) at that time (1948-1952). Whenever someone came in requesting a cartoonist, they sent him to me. Now I’ve heard the whole place has gone to hell and they’ve even got a cartoonists’ course in the curriculum.”
Although he is tall, sandy haired and blue eyed, Wilson suspects the public pictures him as “little, wrinkled and green. … Or they think I’m English and evil, a Dr. Moriarty. That’s okay with me. In time, I’ll probably turn into that.”
A descendant of P. T. Barnum and William Jennings Bryan, Wilson insist he “was not born, although people keep asking me that. I always tell them, I was constructed during the 12th century by a mad scientist and sent forward in time and placed in the body of a cartoonist.”
Actually, Wilson was almost stillborn. “They were about ready to drop me and forget the whole thing when the G.P. rushed in and dipped me in hot and iced water alternately and kept whacking away at me and got me breathing. There must have been brain damage.”
..
A devotee of Carl Jung, Wilson believes there is little difference between existing and imaginary monsters. He considers fast food stores and self-service gas stations parts of “a massive plot to prepare us to live on spaceships.” He says he has “no idea” why nobody has sent him to a psychiatrist and happily disclaims rumors that he spends two months each year in a psychiatric ward.
But why is he so - different?
“I don’t know what to say.”
Well, then - what led to his style of comic art?
“I don’t know what to say. ‘Dick Tracy’ impressed me when I was a child. I never could figure out how that cartoonist did it. Those faces were just scrawls but he could get such expression out of those scrawls. It’s the best comic strip that ever happened. ‘Krazy Kat’ also impressed me. In the movies, W. C. Fields. In fine arts. Goya. It’s an endless list.”
Isn’t his humor close to that of Charles Addams?
“We’re coming from the same area. Addams was more influenced by the movies of Karloff and Lugosi. Because of the Sixties, we’re pooled together. I was influenced by Frankenstein and Dracula also - but more often, most of my material comes from TV news. The news itself is so grotesque and bizarre. It gives me material that is much more productive, stimulating.”
His humor has also been compared with that of Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and Woody Allen. Perhaps the satiric blend is why such diverse publications as Playboy, The New York Times, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The New Yorker, Collier’s, Look, Punch. Esquire, Paris Match, Audubon and Gourmet have called on him to add a little life (if that is the correct word) to their pages.
..
“When I started out I had a lot of trouble. Editors thought my stuff was funny and they’d laugh. But they’d say their readers wouldn’t understand it. There are still some old stuffy magazines that won’t buy it. But most publications respect their readers’ intelligence more now and I’m able to give it my best shot…
“I keep in mind the intended magazine before drawing something because each one’s different. Each one has a different voice and a different way of life. The New York Times has a certain image and Playboy has another image. Like when I do something for National Lampoon, I make sure it’s in bad taste.”
He drew a daily comic “for a brief time. It was a sort of comic page. I got into editing it myself, too. But I kept softening it so I wouldn’t offend all the little old ladies and I wrecked it. I got tired of doing a continuing thing every day and having to watch the thing.”
His books include “Graveyard Manner.” “The Man in the Cannibal Pit,” “I Paint What I See,” “The Weird World of Gahan Wilson,” “First World Fantasy Collection Anthology,” “Nuts” and “Is Nothing Sacred?” He has written several volumes for children, including “Harry, the Fat Bear Spy” and “The Bang Bang Family.”
“I’ve been getting into short stories. I’m on radio now. I do commentary, sort of like Alfred Hitchcock, on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
His comic “Nuts,” in which he explores common childhood fears, appears in National Lampoon. “Not all of them are drawn with my childhood in mind - but a good many. I find that it’s much stronger than I think at times. At a coffee or a lecture somebody will pull me aside and ask me ‘how did you know’ about that very secret thing he did as a boy. I’ve discovered that we all went through amazingly the same things as children. And it’s very touching to me. Everybody’s stuffed a ruined T-shirt in a drawer, thinking his mom wouldn’t find it. And every kid in history thinks he’s the first to do it.”
..
Wilson’s gags must be approved by a final authority before they meet the public eye.
“The only person whose opinion I value is my wife, Nancy Winters, the novelist (“The Girl on the Coca-Cola Tray,” “Daddy”). She’s a very good editor and has a good sense of humor. I’ll give o
ne to her routinely and if she says it’s not funny I listen to her and ignore the idea. She’s a swell writer. We both work all the time. We don’t have regular jobs. We have our own jobs. We’re our own supervisors. So, I think we work harder than people who work regular jobs. We get up at 9:30 at the latest, take a half-hour break for lunch and then get back to it until 5 or 5:30. Actually, calling it work is not honest because we enjoy what we do so much. We have a little joke in the morning where we kiss each other goodbye and wish the other a good day at the office. - before retreating into our separate rooms.”
Then Wilson sits alone in his studio in front of his blank drawing board. The imaginary creatures surface again. And the cartoonist starts to draw what he sees.
***
The Merry Viking:
an interview with
‘Hagar the Horrible’
cartoonist
Dik Browne
By Dale Andrew White
..
Copyright 1980 by Dale Andrew White
This article originally appeared in
Florida, the magazine of the
Orlando Sentinel-Star
..
(1980) - I pressed the doorbell of the Sarasota, Fla., townhouse and, when its occupant answered, I was momentarily uncertain whether I was being greeted by Hagar the Horrible himself or his creator. The gentleman at the threshold resembled the comics page Hagar considerably (if you could add about 10 years to the cartoon’s exaggerated form): a large fellow with long, gray hair, a reddish beard, a round nose and big, bright eyes reflecting a gentle but pungent humor.
I knew he was Dik Browne, of course, the 62-year-old wit whose daily strip about a dumpy Viking joins “Peanuts,” “Blondie” and “Beetle Bailey” as one of the four most widely circulated newspaper cartoons in the world.
Browne actually was Hagar the Horrible at one time. His three children thought of the name during their tender years when Daddy used to wrestle with them. How Bob, Chris and Sally came up with the title remains a mystery - but when Browne’s drawing board gave birth to the haggard plunderer with a heart seven years ago, he bestowed the name on the character with the same affectionate feeling.
Sipping a glass of Perrier, Browne parked himself on a sofa and recalled his first visit to Florida.
“I worked for Newsweek about a year before the war came and got me. I spent four years in the Army, during which time I was assigned to an Air Force base down here. I was a specialist at ditches and latrines.”
He motioned toward several palm trees dotting a hill to a yacht basin. “I’m from New York, where we don’t have those type things - palm trees. Gosh, they’re peculiar looking. I still get a kick out of looking at those things. Makes me think that God did Disneyland before Disney.”
A winner of two Reubens from the National Cartoonists Society and several other awards, Browne has been recognized for more than his Hagar feature.
Since 1954 he and Mort Walker (“Beetle Bailey”) have collaborated on “Hi and Lois,” another strip for the King Features syndicate. He co-created “the Tracy Twins” for Boy’s Life magazine and while an artist for a New York advertising agency devised the Chiquita Banana and redesigned the Campbell Soup Kids.
The phone rang sometime during our talk and Joan, his wife for more than 38 years, answered it. “It’s Chris,” she said.
As a frequent collaborator on the “Hagar” strip, Chris, said the proud father, is his “main man.”
“Chris has been doing strips for Playboy … I think the real reason he likes working for them is he gets invited to go to some of those parties. He was one of those who gets into that Hamilton Jordan hangout - Studio 59, Studio 54, whatever. You can tell I’m not with it.”
His older son, Bob, is a studio guitarist. Sally, his 22-year-old daughter, “just made me a grandfather. She’s Chinese - born in Hong Kong. We adopted her when she was four-years-old. And wouldn’t you know it, she married a German and moved to Germany. We got a letter from her the other day. She says she’s living in some town straight out of ‘The Sound of Music.’ She’s on the smallest street, in the smallest house with the smallest window - which has the best view.”
I mentioned that I needed to capture his image on film and he left the room briefly to locate a crucial piece of wardrobe. “Chris made this for me,” he said when he returned. He carefully placed a papier-mache Hagar-style helmet on his head. “Where would you like to take the pictures?”
“How about the terrace?”
Browne led me outside, hesitating at a sliding screen door which he said he could barely distinguish. Cataracts, a detached retina and glaucoma have each had a chance to weaken his eyesight.
He leaned against a railing as I brought him into focus. His eyes widened and cheeks reddened with a grin as he glanced from his Hagar belly into the camera. “You got a thin lens?”
Browne’s ambitions did not originally lie with cartooning. At 16, he joined the staff of the New York Journal as a copy boy with intentions of becoming a reporter.
He associated with the paper’s writers, “learned the mysteries of drinking” and in 1936 was graduated to the status of reporter when he got his “police card and trench coat. Those were the days of ‘The Front Page’ and ‘Foreign Correspondent,’ when the newspaper reporter had a certain image. I think there was a vacuum left by the disappearance of images like the newspaper reporter or World War I pilot. Maybe it’s been filled by the likes of Farrah Fawcett and Muhammed Ali. …
“My journalism was never taken seriously, though. I lacked ability. I wasn’t any good in finding sources. I was always misquoting.”
His editor, though, discovered his youthful appearance useful when photographers and artists were banned from the Lucky Luciano trial, “the first major Mafia trial in New York.” Authorities unsuspectingly permitted him to enter and he completed “secret sketches” without getting nabbed.
“They eventually gave me a position called ‘desk assistant’ because they wouldn’t trust me on the street anymore.”
Newsweek hired him as an illustrator, “doing maps and things - a small amount of cartooning. I didn’t like cartooning then and avoided it.”
He changed his mind about cartooning when the Army drafted him and decided his talents could be employed for “training films, posters and manuals. … I had a really great one on venereal disease - a book titled ‘The Facts of Life.’ The character was called Willie Gettit.”
Johnston and Cushing, a New York advertising firm, hired him after he was discharged and he started doing volunteer work for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s television program. Sheen’s 1953 book, “Life Is Worth Living,” featured Browne’s illustrations.
“Then one day I got a mysterious phone call from King Features. Mort Walker, who had been doing ‘Beetle Bailey’ for six or seven years, told Sylvan Byck, the syndicate’s comic art editor, that he was seeking a collaborator for a family strip. He and Byck were making lists of possible artists. Byck was in a dentist’s office for an impacted wisdom tooth, picked up a copy of Boy’s Life and noticed ‘The Tracy Twins.’ He put my name on the top of his list.
“Meanwhile, Mort had noticed my name on a Mounds candy bar ad. We weren’t supposed to sign our names on any ad but I happened to sign this one and sneaked it through. Mort put my name on the top of his list.
“They compared lists, found my name on the top of both, and Byck gave me a call. I thought it was a gag and told him I’d call him back. Later that afternoon Mort and I shook hands and made a 50-50 deal.”
Walker informed Browne that the feature must be a family strip. “I thought it was a crazy idea. But, of course, family strips are always in style. Families are constantly changing. Because family life has changed since the first family strips. Look at the rolling pin. Comic artists never use it in gags any more. You can see how things change when you look at Jiggs, then ‘Blondie,’ then ‘Hi and Lois.’
“Mort didn’t want a milksop o
f a husband. Hi came on strong at first but he weakened a lot. Now Hi and Lois are quite equal in character. He’s easy-going but not a dumbbell. She’s a good wife - but not a nitwit. Trixie, the baby, made the difference. The strip was going nowhere until we introduced her - playing with her sunbeam and thinking about the world.”
“Hi and Lois” started in 38 dailies. The strip is now printed in 800.
“’Hi and Lois’ never skyrocketed but it was always recognized. We’ve always gotten a lot of mail from families about it. The most typical comment is something to the effect of: ‘You must have been looking through our window.’”
In 1973, Browne’s sons expressed interests in cartooning and their father decided to create a strip which could be “a family industry. …Both Bob and Chris were gifted, funny guys who always drew up a storm and I wanted to come up with something we all could work on.”
He sought “an instantly recognizable figure” and soon decided that “there’s nothing more recognizable than a Viking. It also seemed like it would be a good time for Hagar. I think he would have been too gross a character for 10 years earlier. Strangely enough, seven other Viking strips were submitted to King that year. None were accepted until mine.”
An admirer of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, Browne realized that the more caricature-like Hagar appeared, the better his chances of success. “I discovered that round lines are funny. Straight lines are not.” Hagar is noticeably rotund.
“I was interested in presenting a daydream of a Viking strip. Hagar has horns, which is historically inaccurate. Vikings didn’t really look like that. There were no bear skins and such. But for this strip he needed all those clichés. We deal in symbols in this world and that’s a good thing. You can have immediate contract with something.”
Hagar’s domain bears more resemblance to the 20th century - to the suburban lifestyle of Hi and Lois - than to the days with which its setting is linked. “Hagar’s a family man, not the lonely warrior roaming the sea. He is doing a job. He must come home with the loot. He is as much a commuter as the husband of today.”
Little, Wrinkled and Green : an interview with macabre cartoonist Gahan Wilson Page 1
