Gahan Wilson's Poignant Moments of Existential Angst

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Wikipedia offers a brief, if succinct, albeit uncited, description of cartoonist Gahan Wilson's work:

Wilson's cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style and have a dark humor . . . . Wilson's work is . . . contemporary, gross, and confrontational, featuring atomic mutants, subway monsters[,] and serial killers [and] Wilson often has a very specific point to make.

Wilson's cartoons frequently appeared in Playboy magazine, their offbeat humor a favorite with readers.

His work is similar to that of such other artists as Charles Addams (of The Addams Family fame), Edward Gorey, and Gary Larson (“The Far Side”).

The source of the humor in some of Wilson's cartoons is fairly obvious, but, in others, it is subtler. For example, the horror of this cartoon isn't immediately apparent, but, when one “gets it,” the horror—or, in this case, the terror—is apt to be all the more striking.

The cartoon addresses the solipsistic fear that “life is but a dream,” but who, we may wonder, is the dreamer and who is merely the figment of the dreamer's imagination?

A woman, seated at a table in a living room, is about to put the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place. In doing so, she pauses and looks down, to her right. What she has noticed isn't shown to the viewer, as the object of her concern (she looks uneasy, rather than merely curious) is out of frame.

It is only after taking in the big picture, as it were, that the viewer carefully considers the puzzle that the woman is completing, only to find that it is identical to the “big picture,” right down to the missing corner piece that the woman holds, both in the smaller image and the larger one.

Now, we understand her concern. It is not an unseen object that disturbs her, but her realization, born of her discovery of the parallels between her situation and the puzzle she is completing, that she is not the center of her universe, nor is she the captain of her soul. She is merely one in an infinite series of repeated images in which none of the versions of “her” is ever the final, ultimate one. She is merely the copy of a copy among countless other copies, all identical and all terrifying.

If her situation is locked into a series of identical situations over which she nor any other of her various “selves” has any control, her existence is as meaningless as the pastime at which she occupies a leisure moment, because her whole life is this moment, eternally, nothing else and nothing more.

It takes a rare talent to convey so much in a single cartoon panel, without (in this case), even the need of a caption. Such condensed “summaries” of existential angst are immediate and poignant enough to inspire longer works of narrative fiction. Imagine what Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edgar Allan Poe might do in developing such a germ of an idea.

--or what YOU might do!