Underground comix legend S. Clay Wilson passed away the other day at the age of 79, and with him passes a singular sensibility in a sub-genre that was practically defined by it's complete and utter vulgarity and unrestrained salaciousness. Needless to say, I loved his often visually repellent illustration style, so when I had the opportunity to meet and converse with him I absolutely took it. From 2007.
The underground comics art of S. Clay Wilson: Neal Adams he ain't.
Westport, Ct. 1979. A place and time of wonder and nostalgia for your favorite Bunche...
not!
Back then I was but a callow student at Long Lots junior high school —
it's Kindergarten through 5th grade nowadays — who was hating life
thanks to being stuck in an asylum disguised as a place of learning, a
three-year purgatory in which I had to fend off sadistic bullies, battle
with my own raging hormones among an army of uninterested, ripening
young women, and somehow not flunk out from the sheer, crushing boredom
of it all. It was a deadening existence, livened only by my
mildly-thriving racket of shoplifting porn and selling it to my
schoolmates for a handsome profit (of course there was a profit; when
the items are pilfered they don't cost the the pilferer a cent, so it
was all gravy), and my not-terribly-unrelated interest in underground
comic books.
Y'see, there was this used book store in the neighboring town of
Fairfield called the Book Finder, a tiny hole in the wall that went
unnoticed unless one knew it was there, and it had an amazing array of
musty old paperbacks and hardcovers, as well as a massive selection of
back issue comics at very cheap prices. Also among the treasures found
there were assorted undergound comics such as ZAP COMICS, THE FABULOUS
FURRY FREAK BROTHERS, JIZ COMICS, BIZARRE SEX, and many, many others,
all of which the proprietor of the place was more than willing to sell
to underage kids provided the kids had the scratch. Thanks to this
questionable kindness I amassed an impressive library of the genre's
classics, none of which raised suspicion in my house because they were
"merely" comic books, and via them my adolescent mind was expanded in
many none-too-wholesome ways.
As previously stated I was no stranger to pornography, so the sometimes
crude doodlings of grotesquely exaggerated genitalia and
impossibly-graphic acts of coupling between just about every type of
imaginable character and an equally broad range of animals and objects
didn't necessarily shock my young mind. Quite the opposite, in fact; I
longed to experience the sweaty, fleshy arabesques that writhed on the
black-and-white pages, two-dimensional acid-fueled fantasies drawn and
extrapolated from what the creators must have gone through in real life
to some small degree. I figured if anybody could depict greasy-looking
penises plumbing the depths of cavernous vaginal expanses the way these
guys did, images so utterly rife with detail that you'd swear you could
smell the effluvium, there had to be some kind of truth behind all of
it. But sometimes such imagery could prove problematic as the creators
allowed their darker, more violent and misogynistic imaginings free
rein, and one could often find images of rape and torture that were
intended to be simultaneously titillating and humorous, a blend that I
found frankly repulsive and that continued to survive well into the
1990's at least (HORNY BIKER SLUT, anyone?).
However, there were two artists whose work I enjoyed so much that in
their cases I was willing to overlook the nastier aspects of their
output. One was Robert Crumb, the underground realm's equivalent to Jack
Kirby or Will Eisner in terms of his impact on the medium, and I
honestly consider him to be one of the greatest cartoonists and social
satirists of the past half-century (or ever for that matter). The other
is less well known to those who've never dabbled in undergrounds, and
that man is S. Clay Wilson, creator of some of the most disgusting and
offensive comics ever committed to paper, and cited by Crumb himself as
being a major liberating influence on his own work.
Wilson's comics are no holds barred, balls-out exercises in filth and
depravity, seasoned with liberal lashings of lovingly-depicted
ultra-violence of the sort guaranteed to piss off most women, even some
of the more ribald and twisted females that I'm proud to associate with,
and that's saying something. Wilson's work is unrepentantly offensive
and even somewhat ugly, but its ugliness is actually a huge part of its
appeal for me. His characters all look to be sorely in need of a bath
and a shave — both the men and the women — and the landscapes in which
they get up to no good brings to mind a twentieth century Hieronymus
Bosch, dosed out of his fucking mind on homemade mescaline and airplane
glue.
The Checkered Demon shares a quiet moment with a charming young lady.
Stuffed to the gills with pirates, dykes, demons, and all manner of
lowlife scum, Wilson's stuff was quite an eye-opener for me, and if I
had to single out only one of his works as my favorite it'd have to be
the vile stuff he spewed onto the pages of 1975's Chernobyl of bad
taste, FELCH CUMICS #1.
Yes, it does read "CUMICS."
When I first got my hands on this scatalogical masterpiece I was very
much aware of what most sex acts were (in theory if not actual
practice), but I had no idea what "felching" was. That question was
answered by the image found on the cover, and also on damned near every
interior page. In case you somehow made it to the stage in life where
you actively read a blog like this one and have no clue as to what
felching is, please allow me to enlighten you: felching is when a guy
fucks someone in the ass, blows his load, and then sucks his own
population paste from the receiver's now glazed butthole. In other
words, as stated on the cover, felching is "a retrieval system," and
every story in FELCH CUMICS #1 illustrates that as graphically and
offensively as humanly possible. The whole thing is utterly foul and
mostly hilarious — if you go in for this sort of humor, that is — but
the prize for the most outrageous story goes to Wilson's "The Holy
Virgin Mary Meets the Felching Vampires," in which the Blessed Virgin —
you may have heard of her at one time or another — is assaulted by two
incongruously erudite nosferatu who feast upon her blood and anally rape
and impregnate her, thereby assuring that she gives birth to Jesus
Christ via her tortured butthole, thus preserving her status as a
virgin. This fantastic bit of blasphemy is illustrated with an image of a
zonked-out-looking Mary rectally launching the Savior, umbilical cord
and all, covered in shit, onto the manger floor. The story continues
with the grownup Jesus's miracles being attributed to the fact that he's
got felching vampire powers, but seriously, how do you top the image of
Mary literally shitting out baby Jesus? Answer: you don't.
So imagine being a fourteen-year-old me and getting caught with this
virtually radioactive piece of smut by my junior high school's dreaded
vice-principal, Mr. Sullivan, a perpetually irate disciplinarian who
many of us students figured would have greatly benefited from a couple
of tabs of strong acid. Sullivan, a Catholic, was especially outraged by
FELCH CUMICS's Virgin Mary story, and he was about to suspend me from
school until I talked my way out of the situation by citing the works of
William S. Burroughs and the allegedly offensive imagery contained
therein. He was stunned by my argument since most of the kids in my
school were still struggling with TOM SAWYER, and he eventually calmed
down long enough to let me off the hook provided I never brought such
"filthy material" to school again. I agreed and he confiscated the
offending literature, probably to take home and whack off over while
dressed in a nun's togs. I considered it a small price to pay to avoid
suspension and the far more horrible threat of the wrath of my
psychotically-menopausal mother, but what I didn't know was that I would
never find another copy of FELCH CUMICS #1 for nearly thirty years, it
being one of the harder-to-find examples of the more extreme underground
comic books.
Skip ahead to the recent NYC comic book convention, and yours truly
wandering the Penn Plaza Pavilion's second floor — and consequently
mostly second tier — "Artists' Alley." For those of you who don't go to
the unwashed geekfests that are comics conventions, Artists' Alley is
where all of the attending luminaries of the comics biz are situated for
signings, sketches, and the shilling of whatever they may have
available for sale, and the "name" cartoonists are given the better
locations. The second tier creators, some of whom may actually be
A-listers but couldn't get squeezed in with the star group, usually find
themselves relegated to some obscure corner of the convention hall,
sometimes on a different floor altogether. The B-listers usually consist
of bright-eyed amateur kids displaying their DIY comics without a hint
of the weary bitterness found on the faces of the veterans who've been
kicked in the mouth by the steel-toed boot of the biz, representatives
of the steadily-dwindling survivors of the Golden and Silver age, the
occasional writer or editor whose name is familiar from the credits,
many of my former peers who are the inking and penciling cogs without
whom deadlines would never be met, and maybe one or two "outsider"
artists.
As I walked about on the glutted second floor, my delightful pal Jill at
my side, I scanned the tables for familiar faces and former colleagues,
saying "hi" here and there, before noticing a section populated by a
bunch of funky-looking old geezers who seemed somewhat familiar. I soon
realized one of them was an aged Spain Rodriguez, best known as the
creator of leather-clad underground Chicano hero Trashman, and another
was Kim Deitch, an underground comics legend and son of animator Gene
Deitch, the guy responsible for some of the worst TOM & JERRY
cartoons ever made (not meant as a swipe, but as a statement of fact
because everyone I know who's ever seen any of them holds the same
opinion as I do). And sandwiched between the two was a white-haired
codger in shades and a leather beret, busily sketching on a piece of
looseleaf note paper while engaging in curmudgeonly discourse for anyone
willing to listen. I asked myself "Who the fuck is this guy?" and
looked at the comics he had spread out in front of him in hopes of
unloading them. As my eyes focused on the haphazardly strewn pile, I
snapped to attention when I recognized copies of JIZ and PORK in
terrific condition, and I plucked them up for careful inspection under
my collector's gaze. But then my eyes nearly exploded out of their
sockets, for there, lying on this humble and neglected table at a
rinky-dink comic book convention, was a mint condition copy of FELCH
CUMICS #1.
And the icing on the cake was that it was being offered for sale by none other than S.Clay Wilson himself.
Not since meeting Jack Kirby was I so overwhelmed with fanboyish
happiness, and when I introduced myself I must have come off like a
gushing idiot. I blathered to Wilson about how he was something of a
"filth elder" or "smut mentor" to me, and that it was a debt I could
never hope to repay, and I think he was genuinely touched. I also told
him the story of my junior high brush with suspension for having FELCH
CUMICS in my possession, and he beamed when he heard that his hideous
influence had ruined yet another once-innocent youth. And when I asked
him exactly how the fuck he and the other contributors decided to come
up with a comic book solely devoted to the act of felching in the first
place, he told me that they were inspired by a pal of theirs who was
living in France at the time who filled them in regarding that most
odious form of osculation. Wilson grinned like a Jack O'Lantern, rotting
teeth in full display, and said his friend described felching as "when
the buggerer cums inside the buggeree, then stoops to suck his own cum
out of the buggeree's arse. It's a retrieval system!" Surprisingly, this
was the only time I'd ever heard an American use the terms "buggerer,"
"buggeree," and "arse" at all, much less in the same sentence.
I swear to the gods I felt like I was listening to wisdom imparted by
Obi-Wan Kenobi, only of a considerably more base variety than what that
wussy Luke Skywalker ever heard. I was deeply honored.
Pleased as punch to talk with a fan who knew and loved his work, Wilson
signed my copies of his work — which I'd just bought for $25 apiece; a
bit of a gouge, but when would I ever find this stuff again, and much
less be able to have it signed by one of my vileness idols? — and posed
for a picture, taken by Jill, in which I got to simulate felching him.
I love this man and wish he was my dad.
So remember, dear readers, that senior citizens are a national treasure,
and many of them may be a fuckload filthier than you think. And thank
you, S. Clay Wilson. Thank you from the bottom of my raunchy little
heart.
I
was off from work yesterday, beating the hundred-degree heat in my
air-conditioned sanctum sanctorum, having switched with my kitchenmate,
Scott — the guy in the photo — so he could get in some time in a
recording studio on Monday; Scott’s been part of our wacky little pirate
ship of barbecue and booze for about six months, hailing from Texas and
providing authentic cowboy flavor to the joint. The guy’s easy-going,
funny, friendly, and slightly demented, so he fits right in. During his
relatively short time here in the wilds of Crooklyn, he has been
constantly astonished by the day-to-day madness, rudeness, and outright
assholism of the Big Apple, gleefully adding crazy anecdotes to his
repertoire for the amusement of his friends and loved ones back home.
