S. Clay Wilson
Steve Clay Wilson (July 25, 1941 – February 7, 2021) was an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson attracted attention from readers with aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of lowlife denizens, often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers. He was an early contributor to Zap Comix.
S. Clay Wilson
July 25, 1941
Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S.
February 7, 2021 (aged 79)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
American
Cartoonist, Illustrator, Painter
Crank Collingwood
Hank "Elephant Boy" Longcrank
Howard Arnherst
Howard Crankwood
Marquis Von Crank[1]
Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 1992
A striking feature of Wilson's work is the contrast between the literate way in which his characters speak and think and the depraved violence in which they engage. As James Danky and Denis Kitchen wrote in their book, Underground Classics, "He astonished and sometimes frightened his fellow cartoonists, though they saw it as pushing if not eviscerating the boundaries of taste. More than anyone, Wilson defined the boundaries of the medium."[2]
The artist and characters sometimes take violence with a playful attitude, for example getting tired of fighting and agreeing to have sex instead of continuing a battle. Wilson's later work became more ghoulish, featuring zombie pirates and visualizations of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a rotting vampire mother. In many respects, however, his work remained consistent with his emergence in the 1960s. In contrast to the many counterculture figures who moderated their more extreme tendencies and successfully assimilated into the mainstream of commercial culture, Wilson's work remained troubling to mainstream sensibilities and defiantly ill-mannered.
Early life[edit]
Wilson was born on July 25, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska to Lydia (née Lewis) and John William Wilson. His mother was a medical stenographer, while his father was a machinist.[3] He attended the University of Nebraska and later trained as a medic in the United States Army.[3]
He lived in Lawrence, Kansas and held odd jobs before moving to San Francisco in 1968.
Career[edit]
Early career[edit]
Wilson's first published work was in The Screw , an underground newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, which was soon followed by drawings for Grist magazine, a poetry journal published by John Fowler.[3] (According to Charles Plymell, an editor of Grist, Wilson's first published work was in 1966 in Grist #7 and then in Grist #9, also from that same year.) The first appearance of the Checkered Demon is said to have been in an ad in a later issue of Grist. His portfolio was printed the following year in 1967 (with subsequent printings later on in comic book form).
Brain injury and later life[edit]
On November 1, 2008, Wilson suffered a severe brain injury.[7] After attending the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco and drinking throughout the day, Wilson left the house of a friend and was found by two passersby, face down and unconscious between parked cars. Among his injuries were a fractured neck and left orbital bone; it is not known if he was assaulted or passed out and fell.[8][9]
After a week in intensive care, Wilson was put on an accelerated therapy program, but he still showed major difficulty in summoning words, a common form of aphasia following a trauma of this sort.[10] He had recovered enough to write his own signature in the first week of December, but continued to require hospitalization as of the end of December 2008,[11] when a benefit was held to assist with his medical costs.[12] Another benefit was held in Hollywood in March 2009. Wilson returned home in November 2009, able to draw well and speak a little but still requiring special care.[13]
He married Lorraine Chamberlain, with whom he had been living for ten years, on August 10, 2010.[14][15]
In early 2012, he was rushed to the hospital with a buildup of fluid on his brain. After having brain surgery and spending three weeks in rehab, he developed a blood clot in his leg that required another three months in a facility on bed rest, followed by rehabilitation. After that incident, he never fully regained his strength, and suffered further from dementia. He could no longer draw except for the odd face or cluster of geometric shapes or letters. He rarely spoke, but he could answer questions. He appeared to understand much of what was said to him, although he could not actively participate in a conversation.[16]
Tributes[edit]
Wilson's artistic audacity has been cited by Robert Crumb as a liberating source of inspiration for Crumb's own work. Recalling when he first saw Wilson's work (in about 1968) Crumb said, "The content was something like I'd never seen before, anywhere, the level of mayhem, violence, dismemberment, naked women, loose body parts, huge, obscene sex organs, a nightmare vision of hell-on-earth never so graphically illustrated before in the history of art.... Suddenly my own work seemed insipid..."[18]
"He showed us we had been censoring ourselves," said Zap cohort Victor Moscoso. "He blew the doors off the church. Wilson is one of the major artists of our generation."[19] Referring to his and the Zap crew's status in art circles, Wilson himself said, "If you're not good enough to be a cartoonist, maybe you can be an artist."[19]
"Tree Frog Beer" is the drink of choice for many of these characters.