The Macabre World Of Gahan Wilson On Full Display At Sag Harbor Whaling Museum

In this drawing, a handful of men — a laborer, a couple of detectives and a cop in uniform — stand in a cemetery, staring down into a freshly opened grave. In the open casket, a nattily dressed man in a suit sits up with a broad smile on his face, looking back up at the group, and speaks.

“Anyway, I really appreciate you fellows exhuming me!”

It is a glimpse into the mind of cartoonist Gahan Wilson, and the bizarre juxtapositions of reality and fantasy that make his drawings so memorable. The ordinary situations with the extraordinary outcomes.

Most of us of a certain age are familiar with his drawings of monsters and mad scientists, and those who are fans have reason to celebrate as the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum has opened an exhibit of about 40 of the cartoonist’s drawings. These are all originals, with the artist’s handwritten captions, and notes, as well as, on some, initials and an “OK,” apparently indicating they had been approved for publication.

The drawings are more than simple cartoons; they are small pieces of art created by a skilled hand. Wilson, who grew up in Evanston, Illinois, had attended school at the Art Institute of Chicago and the drawings show the benefit of his training. Vivid facial expressions, telling perspective and, surprisingly, a color palette that is both sanguinary and restrained.

And in many cases, the connection the viewer makes with the drawing is in the eyes, whether squinting slits due to the freakishly enormous and toothy smiles on the crowd of regulars sitting around the local bar (“Yeah, I guess you could say we’ve got the happiest happy hour in town.”), to the bulging, angry — furious, actually — eye of the man shopping at a display in a card shop (“Birthday Cards, Get Well Cards, Stop Sending Me Cards”).

“I guess the overall thing I think of,” said Star Black, who owns the home where Wilson lived and worked his last 10 years in Sag Harbor, “the eyes of his people bulge. I was always impressed with what he was able to achieve with a single line.

“One thing that always struck me about Gahan was that he was a very professional and skilled artist,” she continued. “He made it feel like the funniness was spontaneous, but it was something he worked at creating every week.”

And while the Whaling Museum may appear to be an unusual place for an exhibit of Wilson’s cartoons, Executive Director Richard Doctorow says “not so.”

“We’re not just a historical museum,” Doctorow said. “We have a long tradition of offering local artists’ work for exhibit.

“Gahan was a resident here for about 25 years,” Doctorow continued, “and there’s definitely a cartoon or two that appears to have been influenced by his time here.”

Case in point:

One drawing in the exhibit shows a man, bare-chested in a bathing suit, propped up on the sand, glasses perched on his nose with an open book. The sea laps at his feet. Behind him are his wife and son, bundled in winter coats with scarves billowing in the wind, dry leaves falling from empty trees.

“It’s time for all of us to go back to 65th and Third, Richard,” the wife calls to her husband.

It is one of the tamer cartoons in the exhibit.

By contrast consider this holiday offering.

Santa in his red suit (only partially colored in this original, unfinished drawing) is tied to a chair in a basement, ankles bound, with a murderous gang of tykes around him, one with a gun pressed against the back of his head. Another child holds a phone to Santa’s mouth.

“Give the little bastards what they want!”

For many cartoonists, Playboy and New Yorker magazines are the holy grails. Each magazine has prided itself on giving space to the top cartoonists in the country. And young cartoonists like Wilson looking for a break would “scuttle around from one magazine to another,” an experience, he said in a 2008 interview with The Sag Harbor Express, that was “more degrading than being a door-to-door salesman.”

After an editor at Colliers Magazine mistakenly bought several of his cartoons (he was filling in for an editor who had already declined Wilson’s cartoons), it was Playboy that gave Wilson his first big break.

“Gahan desperately wanted an audience with Hefner,” said Black, referring to Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s founder, and had forwarded to him a selection of his drawings, but had never heard back.

So when, in the late 1950s, Wilson was in a Manhattan office building looking for another magazine, an assistant walked up to him and asked “Are you Gahan Wilson?,” recalled Terry Sullivan, a friend of Wilson during his days in Sag Harbor, recounting Wilson telling the same story.

The assistant takes Wilson up to the offices of Playboy and into the office of Hugh Hefner, where he sees a handful of his drawings on Hefner’s desk, Black said.

Hefner gets up and, as if Wilson was a messiah sent to bring a dark humor to the otherwise sexually charged cartoons in the magazine, said “I’ve been waiting for you.”

From that moment on, Playboy embraced Wilson’s bizarre and often macabre sense of humor and offered the cartoonist steady employment.

“Hefner was very generous with Gahan,” Sullivan said. “He would give him a full page almost every month.”

In Sag Harbor, Wilson had a regular routine. He didn’t drive and enjoyed being able to walk into the village to shop or watch people.

Black remembers watching him in his studio on the ground floor of her house, he seemed to always be working on his drawings.

“And then he’d go out to the patio to dry them,” she said.

Every Tuesday he would walk to Main Street and catch the Jitney into the city and, like dozens of other cartoonists, make his way to the office of New Yorker Magazine to pitch his latest batch of cartoons. By this time, Playboy had dramatically cut back on the number of issues it produced each year, and cartoons were submitted by mail. New Yorker was one of the few magazines where a personal pitch would be made. In addition to Playboy and the New Yorker, Wilson regularly appeared in National Lampoon, where he had a strip that ran through the 1970s called “Nuts,” often described as the anti-Peanuts and, unsurprisingly, looked at the darker side of childhood.

Was Gahan Wilson a funny guy?

“In a very low-key, Midwesterner kind of way, and weird at the same time,” said Sullivan, who said he and his wife, Jeanelle Myers — another Midwesterner — would frequently have Wilson over for dinner, especially around the holidays.

“I always thought Gahan was coming over to see my wife because they were both on the same wavelength,” Sullivan said. “It’s like, if some guy was being an asshole, a Midwesterner might say, ‘Oh, God bless him.’”

Sullivan recalls another cartoon that has stuck with him: There’s a guy sitting in a dentist chair. The dentist has an enormous pair of pliers in the guy’s mouth. The dentist’s foot is on the guy’s chest, and with his free hand he’s pushing back on the guy’s forehead, and he’s pulling on the pliers with such force that the guy’s skull is actually coming out of his skin, which is gathering in the dentist’s hand.

“This may hurt a little,” says the dentist.

“He talked about the grotesqueness only in terms of how normal it is,” said Sullivan; the language, the simple “this may hurt,” in contrast with the drawing.

“This is all around us, the weirdness,” observed Sullivan, who recalled explaining to Wilson the ancient Druids’ understanding that “this plane we’re on, is only the shallowest representation of what is. The real stuff is in the netherworld.”

And in an imitation of Wilson’s soft, mild way of speaking recalled the cartoonist saying: “Well, yes, that’s what I’m drawing.”

Near the end of Wilson’s time in Sag Harbor, he had become somewhat unsteady on his feet.

“He was not really in good shape,” recalled Sullivan, who had helped on several occasions to take the cartoonist up to Stony Brook University Hospital. “He had tripped and fallen on the corner of Hampton and High streets, hit the curb and knocked out a few teeth.”

By this time, Wilson’s wife, Nancy Winters, who lived mostly in London in a happy, but unusual relationship, had moved to Sag Harbor to be with him.

“She did a lot of the organizing for him, putting his collection together,” Black said.

That collection was sold, but it is unclear how much of the proceeds from the sale Wilson ever received.

Eventually, Black said, the couple moved back into Manhattan, where it would be easier for Wilson to get around. And ultimately, with both in worsening health, the couple moved to Arizona where Nancy Winters’s son, Paul Winters, took care of them, until Nancy’s death, in March 2019.

Shortly afterward, Winters launched a GoFundMe page to help raise money to address Wilson’s mounting medical bills. And then in November 2019, Wilson, who suffered from advanced dementia and had been living in a memory care facility in Arizona, died.

Winters wrote on the GoFundMe page dedicated to Wilson announcing the death and noted in particular the cartoonist’s skill: “Gahan Wilson leaves behind a large body of work that is finely drawn, elegant, and provocative.”

The show at the Whaling Museum is not limited to the cartoons he did for magazines, but also includes drawings he made for several books, including a series of children’s fantasy books he illustrated through the 1960s and ’70s featuring the character Matthew Looney, which follows the adventures of Matthew and his sister Maria Looney who live on the moon. Also included are illustrations Wilson created for the book “Didn’t Didn’t Do It,” about a group of youngsters who work together to overcome challenges building a treehouse.

Pretty tame stuff when you consider the drawing on the cover of his collection, and one of Sullivan’s all-time favorites, “The Best of Gahan Wilson,” where a man sits on a stool, ready to read an eye chart in his doctor’s office. The room is normal, if minimal, in every way, as is the man himself. Behind him though is the doctor conducting the exam, who, wild eyed, holds, tautly cocked behind his back, a broad blade knife poised to plunge into the man’s neck as he begins to read the eye chart:

I
AM AN
INSANE EYE

DOCTOR AND I AM…

Well, you get the idea.

The exhibit “Master of the Macabre: A Gahan Wilson Retrospective,” will be on view at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum through September 5. The museum is open Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Check sagharborwhalingmuseum.org for more information.