There is, I'm proud and happy to say, a persistent rumor abroad that says I am
put away once a year in an asylum for the insane. The theory behind this legend
has it that the strain of creating cartoons such as the ones in this book proves
too much for me annually, and so I am carted away and boxed off until the good
doctors, possibly by a head transplant, possibly by some other means, manage to
get me once more into feasible shape. Then, I am released to mingle with hUmma-porn-star">Umanity
at large until the next visit to my waiting padded cell.
I can easily understand how this quaint fable got its start. My drawings do tend,
now and then, to be ghoulish, and my ideas are, to put it bluntly, a little on
the odd side. Readers can certainly be excused if they form an image of me made
from equal parts of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee (a glance at
the handsome photograph at right will soon put that idea to rest!), and when I
am introduced to strangers, they are usually quite disappointed by my youthful
good looks and astonished by my genial personality.
"Why, Mr. Wilson," they will often say, "after looking over your
work, I had naturally jumped to the conclusion that you were some kind of a nut
and probably looked something like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Christopher
Lee. Now that I see you in person," they continue, "it's obvious you
have youthful good looks and a genial personality. But where do you get those
weird ideas?"
My reactions to this last question incline to the unpredictable. Sometimes I will
suddenly burst into peals of diabolical laughter; occasionally I will make a little
jest about its being the time of the full moon and frighten away my questioner
with tiny clawing movements of my hands; then again, I will vanish into a secret
panel or trapdoor without another word. Rarely, and this is one of those golden
moments, will I actually give a straight answer.
I have always had an innocent fondness for the macabre and a deep and abiding
affection for the grotesque fantastic. The conditions of my birth may have had
something to do with it, for I am told that I entered this world colored an interesting
and steadily darkening shade of blue and that I took my first breath only after
repeated plunges into bowls of hot and cold water, alternately, forced me to do
so. My inclination certainly was encouraged by the perusal of such toddlers' classics
as the Grimm brothers' grisly tales, helped considerably by the gruesome illustrations
in the amusingly mislabeled "comic" books I read and firmly confirmed
by my steady exposure to the light rays from countless horror movies.
Along with this odd inclination went a firm and steady ambition to become a cartoonist.
Not for me the dreams of clanging through traffic in fire engines or pitching
a no-hitter to the roars of the multitude. I wanted only to sit in some quiet
place and draw funny drawings.
In an attempt to combine these two quirks, I began by borrowing the classic figures
of gothic literature and putting them into day-to-day American surroundings. How
would a Transylvanian vampire fare in Des Moines? Could the police in Brooklyn
cope with a monthly rash of werewolves? Would Dr. Frankenstein manage to keep
ahead of General Electric's research-and-development team, or would he slip slowly
behind? And would witches deplore the commercialism of Halloween, or would they
be pleased at how well their high holiday had caught on?
I still work these traditional themes and most certainly will not abandon them,
but more and more I find my more hallowed monsters being shouldered aside by contemporary
horrors. Frankenstein was very inconsiderate to send his badly sewn monster stumbling
over the Austrian hills, but who is he next to the scientists who delight in presenting
us with carcinogenic food additives or radioactive television sets? Is there really
a contest between a Draculian bat flickering across the moon and the rush of a
thousand IBMs? I find I increasingly rely not so much on the works of Bram Stoker
or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley but on those of the Luces or the Columbia Broadcasting
System. Is there anything in horrific literature to match the Texas tower sniper's
carefully carrying a deodorant along with his bullets? And how about that department-store
knife murder in the Santa Claus waiting line? Or the transplant attempt to put
a pig's heart in a man's chest that failed because the pig woke up and ran squealing
around the operating room while the man died?
So I get my ideas where you get your ideas these days. I get them from Walter
Cronkite and Life and the New York Times and television commercials and best-selling
books and, yes, indeed, from PLAYBOY.
- Gahan Wilson
