{"id":10785,"date":"2013-08-31T08:00:13","date_gmt":"2013-08-31T08:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=10785"},"modified":"2013-08-30T15:22:06","modified_gmt":"2013-08-30T15:22:06","slug":"gahan-wilson-sunday-comics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2013\/08\/31\/gahan-wilson-sunday-comics\/","title":{"rendered":"Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Gahan Wilson<\/b> (Fantagraphics Books)
\nISBN: 978-1-60699-612-6<\/p>\n

According to Gary Groth’s Afterword<\/i> here, legendary cartoonist Gahan Wilson was born in 1930 and grew up reading comic strips.<\/p>\n

It shows.<\/p>\n

The mordantly macabre, acerbically wry and surreal draughtsman has been tickling funnybones and twanging nerves with his darkly dry graphic confections since the 1960s; contributing superb spoofs, sparklingly horrific and satirically suspenseful drawings and strips and panels as a celebrated regular contributor in such major magazines as Playboy<\/b>, Collier’s<\/b>, The New Yorker<\/b> and others.<\/p>\n

He also wrote science fiction, criticism, book and film reviews for Again<\/b> Dangerous Visions<\/b>, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Twilight Zone Magazine<\/b> and Realms of Fantasy<\/b>.<\/p>\n

In an extremely broad and long career he has worn dozens of creative hats, and even embraced that modern electrickery stuff by creating – with Byron Preiss – his own supernatural computer game, Gahan Wilson’s the Ultimate Haunted House<\/b>.<\/p>\n

When National Lampoon<\/b> first began its devastatingly satirical all-out attack on the American Dream, <\/b>Wilson was invited to contribute a regular strip to their comics section. His sublimely semi-autobiographical, darkly hilarious paean to lost childhood ran from 1972 and until 1981 and was recently collected as Nuts<\/a><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n

Few people\u00e2\u20ac\u201c me included \u00e2\u20ac\u201c knew that during that period he also, apparently more for fun and relaxation than profit, produced his own syndicated Sunday strip feature.<\/p>\n

For two years beginning on March 3rd<\/sup> 1974, Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics<\/b> appeared in a small cross-section of newspapers from Boston to Los Angeles and, as with all his work, it bucked a trend.<\/p>\n

At a time when most cartoonists were seeking a daily continuity strip, building a readership and eking jokes out with sensible parsimony, Wilson let himself go hog-wild, generating a half-dozen or so single-shot gags every Sabbath, blending his signature weird, wild monsters, uncanny aliens and unsavoury scenes with straight family humour, animal crackers, topical themes and cynically socio-politically astute observations.<\/p>\n

Looking at them here it’s clear to me that his intent was to have fun and make himself laugh as much as his readers; capturing those moments when an idea or notion gave him pause to giggle whilst going about his day job\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

I’m not going to waste time describing the cartoons: there are too many and despite being a fascinating snapshot of life in the 1970s they’re almost all still outrageously funny in the way and manner that Gary Larson’s Far Side <\/b>was a scant six years later.<\/p>\n

I will say that even whilst generating a storm of humorous, apparently unconnected one-offs, consummate professional Wilson couldn’t help himself and eventually the jokes achieved an underlying shape and tone with recurring motifs (clocks, beasts, wallpaper, etc), guest appearances by \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Kid\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (from Nuts<\/b>) and features-within-the-feature such as The Creep<\/i> and Future Funnies<\/i>\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Collected in a gloriously expansive (176 pages, 309x162mm) full-colour, landscape hardback, this complete re-presentation of a lost cartooning classic offers a freewheeling, absurdist, esoterically banal, intensely, trenchantly funny slice of nostalgia. These fabulous joke page compendiums range from satire to slapstick to agonising irony and again prove Wilson to be one of the world’s greatest visual humourists.<\/p>\n

This is book no fan of fun should miss and, with Christmas bearing down on us, could be a crucial solution to the perennial \u00e2\u20ac\u0153what to get him\/her\u00e2\u20ac\u009d question\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

All comic strips \u00c2\u00a9 2013 Gahan Wilson. This Edition \u00c2\u00a9 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.
\nGahan Wilson Sunday Comics<\/b> will be published September 26th<\/sup> 2013.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gahan Wilson (Fantagraphics Books) ISBN: 978-1-60699-612-6 According to Gary Groth’s Afterword here, legendary cartoonist Gahan Wilson was born in 1930 and grew up reading comic strips. It shows. The mordantly macabre, acerbically wry and surreal draughtsman has been tickling funnybones and twanging nerves with his darkly dry graphic confections since the 1960s; contributing superb … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[90,113,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-classics","category-comedy","category-mature-reading"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-2NX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}