Time to dig in and do what we can for S. Clay Wilson, who’s recovering from a potentially life-threatening brain injury. All the information you need about donating to help Wilson out is available here, and it’s the kind of cause that any comics fan should give to more than once.

As one of the founding underground artists, Wilson showed a generation whose idea of a comics revolution began and ended with early ’60s Marvels just how far outside the box you could go if you had the nerve and the talent to strike out in your own direction. I still remember the shock from 35+ years ago of opening an early copy of Zap and finding the adventures of “Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates.” (I’m grinning even now as I type the words.) The sheer go-for-broke audacity of every panel had me in stitches, and the raw raggedy power of his cartooning was almost overpowering.

Years ago, Reed Waller asked Wilson, “Why pirates?” and he responded, “’Cause it was the farthest thing from Kansas that I could think of.” Like many of us, he’d started out as a young man looking for a way to leave his roots behind and stake out his own future. Where Wilson and most other folks part company, though, was that in finding his own future, he also made one possible for a lot of people who followed him.

I’m not going to suggest any ridiculous connections by claiming a direct relationship between Wilson’s stuff and mine. (Checkered Demons in Disguise? Uh, no.) But I do believe without reservation that the comics-for-literate-grownups movement that I bought into years ago – for that matter, the world of alternative comics itself – wouldn’t have existed if Wilson and his fellow undergrounders hadn’t shown us by example that there was more than one road to travel.

I have a copy of a rare old home movie made in the late ‘60s or very early ‘70s featuring Harvey Kurtzman joining all the Zap headliners at Victor Moscoso’s house to create the “Science Fiction Comics” jam strip. (It was excerpted briefly in the documentary Comic Book Confidential, if anyone remembers that.) Wilson, drunk out of his mind, spends some time mocking Kurtzman’s NY accent – “Hawvey. Hawvey, Hawvey, Hawvey.” – and basically plays the rowdy bad boy, which was no small feat considering the assembled company. But before the evening is through, he’s hauling out a collection of Two-Fisted Tales and fawning over Hawvey like a fanboy at a convention.

I think of that moment and it saddens me to see what’s happened to that young guy in recent months.

Then I think of this

and I start grinning again, which is what so much of his stuff is all about.

The guy’s done more for us than many even realize. Let’s say thank you, and return the favor.

filed under Craft