Born Dead, Still Weird, the moving documentary about the life and work of cartoonist Gahan Wilson, Playboy’s Master of the Macabre, was screened in New York City Tuesday night at The IFC’s Stranger Than Fiction film series. It was a night unlike any other--almost all of New York’s finest cartoonists from Playboy and The New Yorker could be found under one roof for this special event.
During the Q&A that followed, director Steven-Charles Jaffe was asked how he discovered Gahan Wilson’s work. With a big smile and a slight blush, Steven described the outrageous story: “I was 10 years old and my best friend had taken his father’s copy of Playboy into the woods. As I was seeing naked women for the first time, I saw something called ‘The Weird World of Gahan Wilson’ and as I was staring at these offbeat cartoons, my friend set fire to the field we were standing in. So in an instant I was exposed to naked women, Gahan Wilson and pyromania. To this day, Gahan’s cartoons are still the first thing I look for in Playboy.
