Fantagraphics Books and New York’s The Strand bookstore are presenting an evening with Gahan Wilson at which the artist will discuss and sign his new book, Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons. The event will be Tuesday 19 January at 7PM at The Strand, 12th Street and Broadway, in New York City.
The book is a three-volume hardcover in an embossed slipcase with a plexiglass back, and lists for $125. It is “a complete collection of Gahan Wilson’s comic strips, including pieces from Playboy and National Lampoon. Gahan Wilson is among the most popular, widely read, and beloved cartoonists in the history of the medium. His career spans the second half of the 20th century, and all of the 21st (thus far). His work has been seen by hundreds of millions in the pages of Playboy, The New Yorker, Punch, The National Lampoon, and many other magazines. It’s about time that a collection of his cartoons was published that did justice to his vast body of work. Wilson’s illustrations have appeared in every issue of Playboy from the December 1957 issue to today.
“Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons features not only every cartoon Wilson drew for Playboy, but all his prose fiction that has appeared in that magazine as well, from his first story in the June 1962 issue, ‘Horror Trio’, to such classics as ‘Dracula Country’ (September 1978). It also includes the text-and-art features he drew for Playboy, such as his look at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, his take on our country’s ‘pathology of violence’, and his appreciation of ‘transplant surgery.’
“Wilson’s cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style, and have a dark humor that is often compared to the work of The New Yorker cartoonist and Addams Family creator Charles Addams. Wilson received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1981, and the National Cartoonist Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and is the subject of a feature length documentary film, Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe.”