Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder

I'm pretty sure I read this book; I'm pretty sure I owned it. Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder is a 1996 Tor collection of Wilson's single-panel gags, mostly from Playboy (his best-paid and most prestigious venue for most of his career), and I was paying a lot of attention to everything Tor published in those days for the day-job.

(And was then, as now, a big Wilson fan too.)

Since then, I had a major flood at my house in 2011 that destroyed what I said at the time was 10,000 books - I may have overestimated a bit, but it was somewhere in that ballpark - plus all my records of that old day-job. So I have vague memories of this book, and I can't see how I could possibly have missed it, but the only thing I can point to is an entry in my reading notebook to say that I did read it on Halloween of 1996, a few weeks before publication.

That was a long time ago, and a book of single-panel cartoons isn't the kind of thing that sticks in the mind tightly to begin with. So I was able to read Even Weirder as if it were new to me this time.

By my count, there are 232 cartoons here, all presented in black and white, each on their own page. It's full of the usual Wilson material - nervous kids in nice clothes, monsters of all sorts with oversized features and appendages, various aliens and talking animals, more fiendish Santa Clauses than you would expect, sinister cultists and mad scientists, devils and Satan both in Hell and out of it, and two different gags about a wife bricking her husband up, Cast of Amontillado-style. There's also a whole lot of slightly more conventional setups: dinner tables, office desks, diner counters, jury boxes, streetscapes, men and their dogs, analyst couches and doctor's offices.

Wilson was one of the great gag cartoonists of his time - of all time, I'd go further - with a uniquely creepy, horror-infused style and a facility with all of the random wellsprings of humor and a point of view uniquely his own: jauntily, often shockingly and unexpectedly positive in the face of disaster and apocalypse, cynical at its core but not dwelling on that, and full of a whistling-past-the-graveyard jeu d'esprit.

This is a fine collection of his work - but I should also say that he was pretty consistent, and had a long career. The best Wilson collection is the gigantic magisterial Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons (which I also owned, pre-flood; I had it for about a year), but any of his collections are worth picking up if you see them. If you ever liked Gross or Addams, Wilson is right up your alley. (And vice versa, if you're already a Wilson fan.)