Haunted Classics by Gahan Wilson

The Return of the UN-Repressed

by Steven-Charles Jaffe

It was 1962 on a hot and muggy Sunday afternoon out in the sticks of Connecticut. My best friend had decided to celebrate his first communion by inviting me to see his father’s latest issue of Playboy that he snuck out of his house. We crossed the road into the privacy of the woods just as a big fin Chevy Impala convertible drove past with two girls singing along to the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel.”

I opened the magazine, and for the first time in my life I was staring at a photograph of a naked woman. She was swimming underwater adorned in scuba gear and had the same bewitching effect as the mythical mermaid is said to have had on sailors. As I flipped through the rest of the magazine, I suddenly stopped at an arresting cartoon. It showed Leonardo da Vinci looking out at an atomic mushroom cloud with an aide asking him, “And supposing you do repress it, Leonardo? Somebody else is certain to come across it again in a few years.” It was eye candy for the demented, and it rocked my pre-pubescent brain. I had been a fan of Charles Addams’s cartoons, but this was wildly different— in lurid color and out as far as you could go, oozing with one of Wilson’s favorite themes, what he calls “gaiety in the presence of doom.” Of course, I did turn the pages back to sneak more glimpses of the scuba-diving beauty, but damn I was curious about the cartoon by this Wilson fellow, whose first name I didn’t even attempt to pronounce. In the end, I’m not sure what made me feel more excited, the Playmate or the cartoon.

As I gazed at these provocative images, immersed in a guilt-laden trance, I suddenly smelled smoke and heard this strange chortling from my friend. As I turned, I saw him bellyaching with laughter through the rising flames. He had set the dry grass on fire and was howling now at seeing me holding the Playboy, while surrounded by flames. “Shit! What’ve you done?!” I yelled. He pulled his shorts down and started peeing on the flames in a futile effort to extinguish the fire. “Piss on the fire!” he yelled, now in real panic. So, I dropped the magazine and my shorts and began peeing on my side of the flames. The wind kicked up the fire into a gentle roar. We were now both terrified. I knew we were in big trouble, and no amount of urinating would extinguish this inferno. We bolted in different directions, hearts pounding with fear.

I didn’t sleep that night, wrapped in horrible fantasies that the fire was spreading and burning down neighboring homes and the families in them—a waking vision made all the more hellacious with images of Wilson’s cartoon and the naked Playmates dancing in my head. The following morning, I rendezvoused with my friend. When we saw the blackened woods we were horrified but relieved that the flames had extinguished themselves before causing lethal destruction.

In the intervening time, my friend became less inhibited about raiding his father’s Playboy stash. In fact, it was quite easy to gain access, as his father kept the magazines openly in his den, next to his Barcalounger. I soon found many more cartoons by Wilson, many with his own lovingly drawn monsters—Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula and, of course, more Playmates. At that time, I had an extreme fear of movie monsters, and Wilson’s cartoons had no less an effect on me.

In one of those strange twists of childhood fate, shortly after my encounter with Playmates and Wilson’s work, I had my first kiss with a girl. I don’t think the timing was coincidental; the Playmates had awakened a curiosity about my girlfriend’s body, and Wilson had lodged a burr in my mind.

My girlfriend and I started regular afternoon trysts under the guise of listening to Alfred Hitchcock’s records called Ghastly Tales from the Master of Suspense! We told my mother we were going to be listening to these scary stories on the phonograph in the dark and should not be disturbed. Pretty clever cover because we were never busted for it. We laid side by side on the carpet as Hitch’s deadpan droll spoke to us: “The best way to listen to ghost stories is with the lights out. There is nothing like a dark room to attract ghosts…are the lights out? Sound of light switch. Good. Doors closed? Sound of door closing. Blinds drawn? Sound of blinds being drawn. Excellent.” I always waited for my girlfriend to make the first move, while I listened to the story…until I felt her hand reach into my pants and touch me. Even now there’s a certain arousal caused by this memory. I wonder if Wilson’s work, the naked Playmates, the guilt at both, might not have had a direct relationship in choosing Hitchcock’s scary stories as the sound track for my first sexual experiences. I won’t rule it out. I also remember becoming a big fan of the TV show Sea Hunt and making up a game where my girlfriend and I crawled around on the floor, pretending we were scuba diving.

As the years rolled on, Wilson’s visions never really left me. In 1990, I was fortunate to have executive produced the movie Ghost, which among other benefits enabled me easy access to people. My assistant asked me if there was anyone I wanted her to call. Most people in this situation probably would have reached out to studio heads, movie stars, bankers, but I said, “Find Gahan Wilson.” Five minutes later I was speaking with Mr. Wilson on the telephone. We struck up a friendship that evolved into working on several speculative projects to bring his fertile imagination to the big screen. In the on-going gestation process, known in Hollywood as “development hell,” I decided to take a short sabbatical from producing and return to my earliest interest—documentaries. This was also spurred on by seeing the movie Crumb. So, for the past four years, having shot more than 175 hours of footage, which was edited down to 100 minutes, I made a feature-length documentary, Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird.

As I interviewed Gahan I learned about his childhood, growing up in Evanston, Illinois during the Depression and the hardships he endured as a child of alcoholics. To my surprise, he explained that he was drawing monsters since he was three years old. There’s one drawing with a monster hovering over a child in his crib. Gahan’s mother had written on the bottom of the drawing, “Horrible monster come to kill us all.” Intriguingly, when you look closely, the monster in the drawing seems to be protecting the child.

“Counterphobia,” says author and filmmaker Nicholas Meyer, is a term his father, a prominent psychiatrist, described as “a phenomenon when the object feared becomes the object loved…I don’t know where the original monsters lie for Gahan, but there’s no question a large part of that affection in which they are drawn, in which he cares for them, is clearly an attempt to diffuse their lethality into a more benign form.” I wondered who these monsters were that a pre-literate Gahan Wilson had drawn. Did Gahan survive his trauma-ridden childhood through art? What’s the significance that after 50 years of cartooning, he still loves monsters?

And as it turns out, I was not the only one he haunted. I discovered that his extraordinary talent for darkly humorous cartoons, which have justifiably earned him the title “The Master of the Macabre,” influenced an entire generation of readers and played a pivotal role in the childhood of many of today’s leading artists, thinkers, politicians and humorists.

Hugh M. Hefner, Editor-in-Chief, Playboy magazine, the person most responsible for discovering and nurturing Gahan Wilson as an artist, told me he had seen Gahan’s small line drawings in Colliers and Look magazines, then signed him up for Playboy. Last December was the 50th anniversary of their artistic relationship. David Remnick, Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker, first enjoyed Gahan’s work in National Lampoon and publishes his cartoons on a regular basis. Political humorist Stephen Colbert told me that Wilson’s work helped form a bond between him and his older brother, who has since passed away. He said, “I think it meant something to me, because when I was a kid two of my brothers and my father died, and suddenly things that seemed normal made no sense at all and seemed very dark. So, I think this probably has something to do with my love of his work.” Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, no stranger to the macabre, explains in my film his personal connection to Gahan’s monsters and the dynamics of the libido/super-ego conflict in a very humorous story. Novelist and filmmaker Neil Gaiman discovered Gahan’s work in Playboy as a young man, “flipping through the pages, seeing naked ladies, naked ladies, oh, my God, what is this?!” Gaiman also brings up his affection for Wilson’s “Nuts” cartoon strips published in National Lampoon in the ’70s: “The adults in ’Nuts’ are unknowable and terrifying. What I loved about ’Nuts’ is that it’s almost an essay on power dynamics. You have the little kid, who is obviously Gahan on some level, and he has no power, no money, no control. He lives in a world of huge faceless giants. It’s like the bleak downside of ’Peanuts.’ It’s probably the bleakest thing Gahan has ever done.” Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, echoes these sentiments: “I’d never seen anybody portray the paranoia and frustration of being a little kid like Gahan does in ’Nuts.’”

This got me thinking back to my childhood, when I discovered Gahan Wilson’s cartoons in the woods. Were there any psychological connections between his dark and twisted humor, and my…puberty as a result of my childhood fire and brimstone exposure to Playboy? I do have a happy and healthy sex life—whatever that means. However, to this day whenever I open a new issue of Playboy, the first thing I look for is Gahan Wilson’s cartoon.

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