Gahan Wilson (born February 18, 1930) is an author, cartoonist, and illustrator in the United States. His cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style and have a dark humor reminiscent of Charles Addams.
He was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1930. His cartoons and prose-fiction work has appeared regularly in Playboy, Collier's Weekly, The New Yorker and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. For the last he also wrote some movie and book reviews. He has been a book-review columnist for The Twilight Zone Magazine and Realms of Fantasy magazine.
His comic strip Nuts, which appeared in National Lampoon, was a reaction against the saccharine view of childhood in strips like Peanuts. His hero The Kid sees the world as a dark, dangerous and unfair place, but just occasionally a fun one too.
Wilson also wrote and illustrated a short story for Harlan Ellison's anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). The "title" is a black blob, and the story is about an ominous black blob that appears on the page, growing at an alarming rate, until...
Additionally, Gahan Wilson created a computer game titled Gahan Wilson's The Ultimate Haunted House in conjunction with Byron Preiss. The goal is to collect 13 keys in 13 hours from the 13 rooms of a house, by interacting in various ways with characters (such as a two-headed monster, a mad scientist, and a vampiress), objects, and the house itself.
He received the National Cartoonist Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
