Gahan Wilson's Out There

Gahan Wilson is probably best known for his macabre Playboy cartoons--filled with charming monsters, goofy mad scientists, and melting victims--and his cutting-edge work in National Lampoon, but in 1964, he brought his brilliantly controlled wiggly-but-sophisticated pen line to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Wilson's freaks and geeks found a home among the stories of the best fantasy and sf writers of the day, offering a welcome, if sometimes macabre or existentially imponderable, graphic break from the magazine's otherwise straightforward prose. Wilson's playfully black sense of comedy was on full display in these cartoons, delineated in his trademark roly-poly, sensual, delicately hatched line.