Introduction to

Many years ago, when the Earth was young and dinosaurs like Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and Blue Book roamed the world, I was in Philadelphia for a sf convention. Or maybe it was New York. After a while all sf conventions look alike. At some, Heinlein makes a surprise entrance just as he wins a Hugo award, wearing a white dinner jacket, scaring the hell out of those who believed a) he was on the opposite coast and b) there is an order to the Universe. At others, fans fall through motion picture screens and make it difficult for Samaritans to he good. But that's another story. Sadly, as this is written, I learned that John W. Campbell, since 1937 editor of Analog (formerly Astounding), will never attend another convention: his death on July nth, 1971 has thrown the entire field into shock and, whether he was loved, admired, tolerated or disliked, there is no denying he was the single most important formative force in modern sf, a man who was very much his own man, who lived by his own lights and by dint of enormous personal magnetism influenced everyone in the genre. The overwhelming sentiment is that he will be sorely missed and we will never be the same again. Nor will conventions, where John Campbell's presence was always felt.

But back in the antediluvian era when I attended the convention I'm trying to recall, John Campbell was very much with us, and meeting him at a convention was not as startling as the encounter I'm about to relate.

Wandering through one of the many party suites late one night in Chicago (or was it Seattle?) I chanced upon a very tall, slim man, with a sketch pad, leaning against a wall, drawing sketches like mad. I managed to get behind him and I crawled up onto a window ledge to look over his shoulder (I said tall, didn't I?) so I could see what he was drawing. He was cartooning his impressions of the weird fans in the room at the time. I instantly struck up a kinship with him, for I, too, saw the fans with one big eye in the middle of the forehead, with green, ichor-dripping hides, with claws instead of hands, with slavering jaws and hairy ears.

I asked him his name, and he said, "Gahan Wilson."

He pronounced it GAY-un.

He said he was from Collier's, and he was going to do a cartoon-and-text piece on sf conventions.

Even then, in San Francisco—or possibly Cleveland—I was a slavish fan of the peculiar and singular cartoons of Gahan Wilson. Now it is fifteen years later and that piece on conventions never appeared, Collier's is gone, but Gahan Wilson is still very much alive. I would have said alive and well, but . . .well . . .one need only examine the contents of his three books (Gahan Wilson's Graveside Manner [Ace, 1965]; The Man in the Cannibal Pot [Doubleday, 1967]; I Paint What I See [Simon & Schuster, 1971]) to realize that Gahan is anything but well. At least in terms acceptable to straights the world over. Nonetheless, Gahan Wilson has become—through his regular cartoons in Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other periodicals—the premier cartoonist of the bizarre. It has been many years, in fact, since even Chas. Addams gave him a run for the money. When someone at a party says, "I saw the wildest cartoon . . ." and begins to describe it, chances are nine out of ten that they'll be describing a Wilson monstrousness. (Who, after all, can forget that desiccated Santa clogging the chimney, or the death of the sandwich man, or the vampire in the Intensive Care ward?)

What few people who admire Gahan Wilson know, is that he writes. Not just captions, you understand, but criticism, book reviews, and stories. Ah, mm, yes. Stories.

When it came time to assemble this book, I contacted Gahan and suggested he invent a whole new kind of story, a combination of words and pictures in which one could not survive without the other. A verbalization, as it were, of the peculiarly Gahanoid humor seeping (one might even venture festooned) from his cartoons. I said it could be possibly termed a "vieword" story. Gahan liked the sound of the word, and what he contributed follows. I think you will find this initial vieword offering a nonpareil addition to the rotting body of Mr. Wilson's deranged work. Further, he promises us more vieword stories, in other places, from time to time. It behooves each of us to indulge our vile masochism by insisting that he keep that promise.

But for the nonce, here is and here is Wilson for himself. Gahan? Are you there? Oh, there you are; well, drop down at once, clean up all that sickly green stuff, and tell the people about yourself.

"I am a simple, Midwestern lad, born in Evanston, Illinois. I had a delightful early youth, dwelling in a brick warren with a cinder back yard which crawled with other infants. Hallowe'ens were of the Bradburian genre in Evanston, leaves scuttling down the broad streets, a delightfully scary old gentleman in a huge old house nearby to torment, soaping of windows (only the rotten kids used wax), and like that. We played games in the basements, behind the parked cars (some of which had window-shades in the back windows), until we dropped. We wore shorts, the boys, at least, and the girls had pigtails. Then organized sports hit the scene and life turned, by degrees, into a ghastly hell which still raises the small hairs at the back of my neck when I think of it. With the approach of high school this ghastly phase of my life drew to its end and I discovered the world was full of creeps, back alley wanderers, dreamers, chickens, twitching cripples, and that we were not at all as bad as we had been convinced, and that we could have our own kind of fun. This led to a fantastic blossoming which has not yet stopped. From birth, I guess, I wanted to be a cartoonist. There exists a crude, hand-drawn comic strip (showing some space opera type battling robots) which has scrawls in the balloon instead of words, indicating my bent was set before literacy. I went to a couple of commercial art schools during summers and found they taught a superficial kind of art, that nobody could teach being funny, and so took a full four years at The Art Institute of Chicago, a good course, consisting entirely of actual work, painting, drawing, graphics, under teachers of various persuasions. A solid trade school approach. Then a brief stay in the Air Force (it turned out I was 4F, after all) and then a brief stay in Europe (France, mostly), and then an attack on the New York markets which paid off, mostly because of a series of flukes as I was then considered really far out and all the usual entrances to the better markets seemed hopelessly closed. What happened was that the regular cartoon editor of Collier's left for Look, and the art director, who'd taken over on a temporary basis, not knowing what sort of cartoons he should buy, bought mine. Then, when they got a new man in, he kept on doing it, bless his heart. After Collier's vanished I tied in with Hef at Playboy, and have never regretted it. He is a superb editor and exceptionally fair in his treatment of those who work for him. And, yes, the Mansion is all they say it is. I took a wander in Europe for a couple of years (for me, at least, London is the best big city in the world) and enjoyed it very, very much. I am now married to a beautiful, intelligent, and talented woman who writes for major magazines under the name of Nancy Winters. She is far better than I deserve but, so far, I am getting away with it."