Please Cap'n Pissgums,
Don't Cut 'Em Both Off!

A genuine pirate cutlass is proudly displayed on a high cranny. It sits waiting to swoop down on unsuspecting, cowering interviewers. He has a pine coffin, a Baptist pulpit, and down-home pews in his sunny sitting room. A fossilized, rather scary turkey claw dangles above the dining room table, and his grimacing face shines like gold from a box of Quaker Oats. Skulls and Voodoo-y things abound in general; and there's a rattlesnake curtain in the bathroom.

As we talk, pseudo punks in the flat above mindlessly stomp, mosh, and loudly lay down lame jams. This arouses S. Clay Wilson's intense ire . . . ("I wish I was Mingus, I could shoot right through the roof"). There's a fascinating aura of Victorian-Clutter-Death-Menace that pervades the whole scene -- but what else would one expect from the most sexually over-the-top cartoonist alive?

Peace, Love, and Psychedelia weren't his thing. Words such as Rabelaisian, ferocious, fearless, shameless, highly salacious, epatŽ-les-(shock)-the-bourgeoise and damn-the-torpedos-full-speed-ahead could be used to describe his style.

When his work first appeared in the 60's it was no wonder most hippies didn't know quite what to make of him. He seemed to be running the ball way past the S&M end-zone and gleefully spiking it in. Something like the comic book equivalent of the Monty Python fat man barfing scene. (The least wild of his cartoons are is reprinted in this issue). Wow! Wow!! Hail Satan!!! Or whatever.

In the 60's it was imagined he was some kind of idiot-savant biker on Hell's Angel speed, endlessly chasing his horny hyperactive tail. The draftsmanship and energy were superb, but there was something of the perfume of a private Hell. One wonders if the hackneyed stereotype of the Tortured Clown, gore dripping out of candy-apple red nose is fairly accurate: Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Andy Kaufman, R. Crumb, Paul Krassner, Lenny Bruce, BobCat Goldthwaite, The Three Stooges, Justin Green, (Binky Brown) et al. Anyhoo -- Goblin proudly presents the Multi-Hormonal mayhem, never-to-be-duplicated Grand Guignol Genius of S. Clay Wilson.

S. Clay Wilson: I made illustrations for Cities For The Red Night and The Wild Boys, which was printed in Germany by 2001 Publishing -- that was years ago. And recently I was put in a show organized by the L.A. county art museum with Uncle Billy. I also did the cover of Tornado Alley which was published by Charles Plymell. I've been shooting with Burroughs -- he's got an amazing variety of hand guns. He's doing pretty good. He gets especially perky during cocktail hour. He's still very sharp no matter how loaded he is.

Goblin: Do you think your artwork is equivalent to Naked Lunch -- trying to desensitize people with gratuitous sex and violence?

Wilson: Yeah, feed 'em enough to make 'em puke -- or try to enlighten them I suppose. I think rock the boat as much as possible. Comics is such a great form, nobody's ever pushed it as far as it will go; how much data can you cram into a comic strip? It's open ended.

Goblin: How long have you been doing comics, and were you always doing the same thing?

Wilson: I'll show you an example of my early stuff, I was really influenced by EC comics, Piracy, Mad, Two Fisted Tales, etc. These are pictures I drew in 1955 after I first saw EC comics. (He brings out childish dirty pictures of the twisted pirates and a very early sketch of the Checkered Demon).

Goblin: Did you take speed or acid when you were cartooning?

Wilson: People think I'm a speed freak because of all the things I cram in there. I prefer to be straight, maybe smoke a little herb, because speed makes you too jangly. I have graphic agoraphobia, fear of open space. Yes I did take acid, dope, speed, every drug known to man, and yes I did get more pieces of ass than you've had hot dinners.

Goblin: Did you get lots of angry letters from feminists and the Religious Right? Wilson: Yeah, yeah. I've had my life threatened and so forth. Some of them liked being in the comic strip. Some Dykes on Bikes bought my artwork: "All right! He's drawing us!" My original deal in Lawrence Kansas, where I grew up, was imagining exotic characters: various sub-cultures: bikers, pirates . . .

Goblin: R. Crumb said he likes to masturbate to his comics; are they fantasies for you? Wilson: Yeah, you draw the babe that you want to show up. But you better be careful what you draw because a lot of the time she does show up.

Goblin: Is there an actual model for that phallus you're always drawing?

Wilson: Probably myself. (laughter -- Astonished shouts of "Wow!" from the Goblin). Yeah, it's generic dicks. The Japanese used to do that all the time with the exaggerated cocks. The Egyptians invented comic strips but the idea of mass marketing and reproducing those strips on pulp paper came from the Japanese. They invented dirty comics basically. But now they've become so westernized they can't show penetration, they air brush out the pubic hair, etc.

Goblin: How much research did you do for the pirates beyond reading EC comics?

Wilson: I try to have models around, this is my cutlass. (He waves a genuine pirate cutlass around, deftly lopping of one of J.R's nads). Mainly it's Howard Pyle's Book Of Pirates. Actually, I have a book called Sodomy In the Pirate Tradition, among others -- lots of historical material. There really were lesbian pirates. I was always fascinated with what's going on below decks.

Goblin: Your comics were really ahead of their time because that was the time of Love and Peace. Those hippies were shocked.

Wilson: Zap! Comics happened in the summer of love, 1968 - it's more radical now than it was then. Because there's all this repression now.

Goblin: Could you tell us about the collaboration strips you did?

Wilson: We'd all sit around at a table and drink this and smoke that and pass it around. You got so many egos in the same room it got ridiculous. Who's going to be the art director?: Well there's no plot! And we're all loaded and bouncing off each other - it's like a garage tape, jamming with each other. The surrealists did the same thing. It's a graphic circle jerk. We'd come up with something and divide up the panels. (P.S. Frida Kahlo did the same thing with her crowd - G.)

Goblin: Did you all get along well?

Wilson: Yeah. Now that Crumb's a big movie star in the South of France he think his shit don't stink, so he's getting some grief. You can read all about it in Zap! 14. How he got punched out and thrown off the roof -- shit like that. Here we are, been working together for thirty years and he abandons the Zap! thing. At least he could confront us but he's always hiding. We're trying to work on his Catholic guilt.

Goblin: Why isn't there any mention of Satan in the Checkered Demon strip. Isn't Satan his boss?

Goblin: He doesn't take sides very much.

Wilson: There's this triangle. Ruby the Dyke and the Checkered Demon both want Star Eyed Stella and she's all "Uh." It's a bitter triangle -- if you get three people involved like this together you have stories forever.

Goblin: Have you considered doing lighter art to counter-balance all your heavy dense art?

Wilson: I did a children's book entitled "Wilson's Anderson." I always wanted to be a children's book illustrator way back when, but I took some LSD and took a left turn graphically. We got William Burroughs to write us a little blurb on the back, but they misspelled Burroughs! How could they do that! The stories are pretty lugubrious -- The Rose Elf for instance -- where the woman is kissing the "cold blue dead lips" of her lovers' head. Later versions leave all this stuff out. Disney takes a great old story and they "bleach" it -- as they used to say about music. To make it palatable and generic. These stories are supposed to scare the shit out of little kids so they'll eat all their broccoli.

Goblin: There seems to be an inherent human taste for violence and gruesomeness and horrible ghost stories, it's almost genetic. I wonder what the purpose of that taste is. Wilson: It's like Edward Lear's stuff. And also, don't suck your thumb or else somebody will come along and cut it off. ("Struhwel Peter") A lot of these stories can be tracked. Every culture has certain stories like urban folk tales are now.

Goblin: What are your favorite and least favorite comic strips around today? And how about Nancy, because some people love her and some people hate her.

Wilson: I like Nancy because of the absolute minimal blandness of the graphics. I like Chester Gould better (Dick Tracy in the early days). I just like comics. I don't like a lot of the comics around now - super hero comics especially. I like stuff where the artist writes and draws all his own material. Look at this artwork they're doing in Europe. Over there you can go into comic department stores and get all the smut you can imagine. (He shows us some dirty European comic strips that resemble the work of Spain, another cartoonist). It's too bad there's so much censorship over here because in Europe anything goes. You can't show penetration especially.

Goblin: Have you ever been busted for that?

Wilson: It has happened. What they do is bust the guy who sells it and put pressure on him. So a billion people may want to look at a comic, but if one blue haired old lady doesn't want you looking at a comic she calls the smut squad, and they close the store down. Ironically enough the artist doesn't go to the bucket. There's still this repression going on. I think it's going on now on a grander more insidious scale than it ever was. It's still going on; they want to control the media, TV, etc.

Goblin: But do you think they'll succeed?

Wilson: I think they are. Every time you see a video store going up -- essentially these movies are just mega-corp ads for toys and whatever -- just generic pap written by commuters -- and every time you see one of those go up you see a library go down. I predict in ten years it will be illegal "not" to have a television. They'll drag you off to jail if you're caught reading. I don't have a TV. But I read a lot.

Goblin: There seems to be a general erosion of detail in our life, like mannequins no longer have heads. What do you think is behind this conspiracy -- is it because of over-population?

Wilson: I think it's geared to advertising -- commercial jingoism. Like the conventions. Maybe it's because of TV. And now they have computers so nobody will see anybody. I mean the information is available to everybody and that's good. But basically it's so vicarious. Nobody's getting drunk with each other, they're all going "beep beep beep" on the net.

And now we have AIDS. There's your last vestige of freedom going down the toilet. I prefer it when AIDS wasn't happening and you could just have fun and get the crabs. Now you can't screw because you'll die!

Goblin: How open minded do you expect your audience to be?

Wilson: What happens is the very people whose mind you blow, who really hate your work and want to burn it, a lot of times will become your defender. Like David Arlington at the comic book store, when he first saw Zap! Comics he wanted to have me arrested, but he ended up owning the strip that offended him. So what's considered to be radical constantly changes; like with anything. In Victorian England if you saw a bare, well turned ankle it was considered erotic. (Piano legs were sometimes cloaked by Doilies -- G.) The problem is people want to control everything. (Does a William Burroughs imitation, "Control the images, control the machine.").

Goblin: What directions do you think comic books are going in?

Wilson: I think a "formal" change. Jazz is a pretty open form. I think a comic strip, like jazz, is pretty American. The variations of how much stuff you can cram into a comic strip or how far you can stretch the envelope in a form of music or a comic strip is pretty endless, you're limited only by your imagination.

Goblin: Do you think comics will end up on computers?

Wilson: I think comic strips might change form but I don't like the idea of actual comics not being available. But maybe it will go in that direction, and comics will become collectors items, but then there will be a backlash and everybody will get sick of computers, and go back to nostalgia of printed comics, newspapers, and magazines. Goblin: That's happened with vinyl -- a lot of people think it's actually a warmer sound than CD.

Wilson: I have a stereo which I think is modern, but now they have CDs. I like the feel of records, the fact that they have a jacket on them, it "is" transient, you have to keep track of them, use mineral water to clean them off. But now on CD there's more availability of all kinds of music than there ever has been. Which is really great, the more stuff available the better.

Goblin: I'm pretty sure CDs are from an alien technology.

Wilson: The aliens are probably up to something else, they don't even need the CD. What they did is exchanged the technology for a word or two of some politicians speech. Like with the mayor of Greensboro in North Carolina: there was a Black that got whacked. When the mayor was asked about his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, the mayor said, "It's a shame it had to happen here." He could have left the "here" off, since his statement implied that it's okay if it happens in somebody else's backyard. That's an example of how one word can change the course of human history.

Let me explain: you said the CDs are part of alien technology. The aliens said, "what we'll do is change a word to change how things are going in exchange for the technology." Like that Ray Bradbury story, where there's a Safari to the past to hunt dinosaurs and the guy stepped off the path, and when they get back everything's messed up because there's a bug crushed on the bottom of his shoe.

Goblin: Are comic books the best means of subversion of young minds -- which is something close to all of our hearts.

Wilson: I think MTV is subverting young minds, but I think it's insidious, I think it's crap, and it's square! It's just an act. Once it's on TV it's not subversive at all. The kids have moved on, they speak another language. Like "Gangsta" slang, it's constantly changing to keep adults in the dark. The marketing people are trying to think what the kids are thinking. And now the hip language is all prepackaged so you have kids running around talking like the Blacks they see on TV or movies. That's subversive, because you're supplying a generic "clip art product" that poses radicalism for the young -- and they're sold a product rather than finding anything on their own.

Goblin: What do you think of art that's main goal is to irritate -- not like a 16 year old trying to irritate his parents -- but art that's philosophy is to irritate to keep people from becoming complacent?

Wilson: To quote Tristan Tzara (Zurich 1916) "We are the ghosts of energy, let the tridents strike unsuspecting flesh!"

For S. Clay Wilson's publications write for catalog: Last Gasp Comics 777 Florida St. San Francisco Ca. 94110. Fan letters and requests to buy original artwork can also be sent to this address.