| S. Clay Wilson | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 25, 1941 Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S. |
| Died | February 7, 2021 (aged 79) San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist, Illustrator, Painter |
| Pseudonym(s) | Crank Collingwood Hank "Elephant Boy" Longcrank Howard Arnherst Howard Crankwood Marquis Von Crank[1] |
Notable works | The Checkered Demon Zap Comix |
| Awards | Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 1992 |
| Spouse(s) |
Lorraine Chamberlain
(m. 2010) |
| http://sclaywilson.com/ | |
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.
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.