Kevin O’Neill was een Brits striptekenaar.
‘Strips’ klinkt een beetje oneerbiedig. Het gaat eigenlijk over ‘graphic novels’.
Hij was vooral bekend van zijn werk aan The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, het meesterwerk dat Alan Moore in 1999 bedacht.
Kurt Westergaard was a Danish cartoonist famous for drawing the cartoons of Mohamed that were the object of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005.
These cartoons made him the target of multiple death threats and assassination attempts. As a result, Westergaard lived, for the rest of his life, under police protection and in hiding.
Edmond Kiraz was a French-Armenian cartoonist and illustrator.
He is best known for his Parisiennes, his post-war Parisian wafer-thin model girls which first appeared in print in 1966.
In the United States, Gahan Wilson died. I saw his death announced on the Facebook page of Tim Lucas.
Gahan Wilson was an American author, cartoonist and illustrator.
I was unacquainted with the work of Wilson. Dave Letterman introduced him in the 1980s as the “guru of gruesome, wizard of the weird and the Michelangelo of the macabre.”
Me being European, Wilson reminds me of Tomi Ungerer (1931- 2019) or Roland Topor (1938-1997) and perhaps more of Topor, since like Topor, Wilson was not political.
Wilson is regarded as the only heir of Charles Addams (1912-1988) and often mentioned in one breath with Edward Gorey (1925-2000) .
The epithet ‘sick humor‘ sometimes pops up, although I have to disagree on this one, as, as a European, I am used to Hara Kiri, most likely the epitome of 20th century sick humor.
Since I found out about his death, I watched the “The Waitress” episode of The Kid (2001) and Wilson’s appearance at David Letterman’s (March 30, 1982) when he published Is Nothing Sacred?. I also listened to a reading of the wonderful story “The Sea was Wet as Wet Could Be” (1967).
His cartoon “I am an insane eye doctor and I am going to kill you now…” is frequently cited as of his best work. In it, a non-suspecting man reading an optometrist’s ‘eye examination’ with the text cited is approached from behind by a knife wielding optometrist.
There are body horror elements in his work and the cartoon “Harry, I really think you ought to go to the doctor.”, in which Harry is a regular man with the head of a prawn, is positively Lovecraftian.