Steve Clay Wilson (July 25, 1941 – February 7, 2021) was an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson attracted attention from readers with aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of lowlife denizens, often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers. He was an early contributor to Zap Comix.
A striking feature of Wilson's work is the contrast between the literate way in which his characters speak and think and the depraved violence in which they engage. As James Danky and Denis Kitchen wrote in their book, Underground Classics, "He astonished and sometimes frightened his fellow cartoonists, though they saw it as pushing if not eviscerating the boundaries of taste. More than anyone, Wilson defined the boundaries of the medium."
The artist and characters sometimes take violence with a playful attitude, for example getting tired of fighting and agreeing to have sex instead of continuing a battle. Wilson's later work became more ghoulish, featuring zombie pirates and visualizations of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a rotting vampire mother. In many respects, however, his work remained consistent with his emergence in the 1960s. In contrast to the many counterculture figures who moderated their more extreme tendencies and successfully assimilated into the mainstream of commercial culture, Wilson's work remained troubling to mainstream sensibilities and defiantly ill-mannered.
Early life
Wilson was on born on July 25, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska to Lydia (née Lewis) and John William Wilson. His mother was a medical stenographer, while his father was a machinist. He attended the University of Nebraska and later trained as a medic in the United States Army.
He lived in Lawrence, Kansas and held odd jobs before moving to San Francisco in 1968.
Career
Early career
Wilson's first published work was in , an underground newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, which was soon followed by drawings for Grist magazine, a poetry journal published by John Fowler. (According to Charles Plymell, an editor of Grist, Wilson's first published work was in 1966 in Grist #7 and then in Grist #9, also from that same year.) The first appearance of the Checkered Demon is said to have been in an ad in a later issue of Grist. His portfolio was printed the following year in 1967 (with subsequent printings later on in comic book form).
Underground comix
In California, Wilson met up with Charles Plymell, who was publishing Robert Crumb's Zap Comix. Wilson needed little persuasion to contribute to Zap. Wilson began collaborating with Crumb in late 1967, and all issues of Zap comix starting with #2 contain his work. It was in Zap #2 that Wilson widely debuted his most famous character, The Checkered Demon, a portly, shirtless being generally seen wearing checkered pants.
Wilson was also a frequent early contributor to another underground project, the Yellow Dog tabloid anthology. Wilson's work was featured in all three issues of The Rip Off Review of Western Culture, published in 1972. The third issue (Nov./Dec. 1972) featured an extensive interview with Wilson by Robert Follett, the publication's editorial director. Wilson was also a frequent contributor to Arcade, edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith; as well as Weirdo, Crumb's post-underground anthology published in the 1980s and early 1990s. Wilson's underground comix work was praised by such counterculture icons as William S. Burroughs and Terry Southern.
Painting
The Art of S. Clay Wilson, published in 2006 by Ten Speed Press, covers his prints and paintings as well as his comics work.
Book Illustrations
His illustrations for Burroughs' Cities of The Red Night and The Wild Boys were published in German editions by 2001 Publishing. In 1994, he began interpreting classic children's stories, illustrating Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, as he explained to interviewers Jon Randall and Wesley Joost: I did a children's book entitled Wilson's Andersen. 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.