Steve Duin at the Oregonian is reporting that S. Clay Wilson, one of the seminal underground cartoonists of the 1960s and a member of the Zap Comix crew, suffered a “severe brain injury” last weekend, though what caused the incident is unknown at this time:

[Lorraine] Chamberlain — Wilson’s partner of the last eight years (”though,” she added, “we’ve been flirting with each other for 40″) — said authorities in San Francisco originally believed that Wilson was mugged on his way home from a fairly heavy drinking binge. But Chamberlain now believes “it may be that he fell so many times” on the short walk home:

“That’s what we think now, that he fell several times and hit his head,” Chamberlain said. “He has a fractured orbital bone in his eye and he fractured his neck. He looks like he’s been kicked in the face and beaten up. But if he’d been beaten up, he would have been robbed. There’s no way to know. But he had way too much to drink.”

A cartoonist for whom, at least in his work, too much was never enough, Wilson’s comics constantly pushed the sex and violence envelope, usually depicting pirates or biker gangs (sometimes both) in epic orgies of blood and other body fluids. His work had a profound influence on Robert Crumb and the other cartoonists of his era, encouraging them to avoid censoring their work and unleash their id upon the page.

You can read a recent interview with Wilson over at The Comics Journal

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.