Gahan, Gahan!

A few days I was wasting some time in my new favorite bookstore Half-Price Books and in the art section (not the cartoon section where I usually hang out) I stumbled across a real gem. The three-volume Fantagraphics collection of Gahan Wilson -Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons was sitting high on a shelf, still safely snug in its original plastic wrap and severely discounted and to boot there was a twenty percent store wide discount on too. I snapped it up,  and lugged the quite heavy three-volume set over to a whole other section of the store.

In that section they had several volumes of the Fantagraphics collection of Gahan Wilson's Nuts comic strip from the pages of National Lampoon. "Nuts" is Wilson's "horror" comic produced for NatLamp which depicts in all its sometimes gruesome glory the rigors of childhood. He says it was inspired by some Picasso paintings he once saw. Curiouser and curiouser.

This far more Gahan Wilson than I've ever owned before and it will take some time to plunder the riches. The Playboy collection publishes his cartoons for Hefner's infamous magazine from 1957 pretty much to the present day. For a closer look at its contents go here. And for an interview in which Wilson discusses both books at length go here.

Despite my New Year's resolution to bring in fewer books this year than I get out of the house, it's still a pretty neat way to start the year, I must say.

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