<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Gahan Wilson (b. 1935) believes he was helped to get off to a good start in the horror business by being born dead. He was saved from this condition only because the family doctor intervened by bursting into the operating room and repeatedly plunging him first into a bowl of hot water and then into another filled with ice until he’d bullied the infant into living. Wilson spent his boyhood years in Evanston, Illinois, which was (and likely still is) littered with huge mansions sheltering rich eccentrics who tend to go mad in all sorts of interesting ways.

After graduating from the prestigious Chicago Art Institute, he eventually succeeded in persuading highly dubious magazine editors to buy his macabre cartoons. Some of his earliest artwork appeared in the final issues of the original run of Weird Tales, although nowadays his work is mostly seen in Playboy and The New Yorker. His cartoons have been collected in a number of volumes, including Gahan Wilson’s Graveside Manner, Is Nothing Sacred?, The Weird World of Gahan Wilson, Still Weird, Even Weirder, Gahan Wilson’s Gravedigger’s Party, Gahan Wilson’s Monster Party and The Best of Gahan Wilson.

His short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and were collected in The Cleft and Other Odd Tales, and he has edited the anthologies Gahan Wilson’s Favorite Tales of Horror and The First World Fantasy Awards. Along with a number of children’s books and two peculiar mystery novels, he has also illustrated the graphic works The Raven and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, The Devil’s Dictionary and Other Works by Ambrose Bierce and Gahan Wilson’s Big Book of Freaks. He has presently extended his activities into movies and television and feels the best so far among those so far accomplished is the animated short, Gahan Wilson’s Diner, and an animated special for Showtime Networks entitled Gahan Wilson’s Kid.