Gahan Wilson 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons (3 Volumes)
by: Wilson, Hugh Hefner(Ed.), Gahan

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Three hardcover volumes in a pictorial slipcase, 1056 pages. Few cartoonists ever had as lavish a tribute as a three-volume-slipcased collection, but few are as deserving as Wilson. Collecting 50 years worth of his monthly single page gag cartoons from Playboy, it's a definitive overview of a remarkable talent and viewpoint. Considering the timeframe, Wilson's fabled black humor and art style remain remarkably consistent--as time passes, the drawing renders into slightly blobbier shapes that retain all of their wit just the same--but the source and degree of the humor is a constant. Although best known for his slightly lugubrious subjects--monsters, witches, corpses, vampires and skeletons are frequent visitors to these pages--Wilson also targets consumerism, materialism, and other basic human foibles. As publisher Gary Groth writes in a biography in the third volume, He has constructed a world that is eerily family, unsettlingly recognizable and lethally consistent. Beautifully designed and printed, the books contain cut-out pages, and the slipcase itself becomes a window for a trapped photo of Wilson. Text extras include Wilson's prose short stories and an appreciation by Neil Gaiman.