“He had barely done it when he heard Faulks give a small cry of despair. He turned to see the old fellow wringing his hands in abject misery. “I just blinked, sir!” he quavered. “Only blinked!” It had been enough. A fraction of a second unwatched, and the
was gone from the sill. “
The Story of a Uncontrollable Inkblot - An Unnatural Creature Indeed
“A spot. Nothing more. Black, as you see, somewhat lopsided, as you see—an unprepossessing, unpretentious spot. “
Book Synopsis
GAHAN WILSON is a cartoonist. He draws things that scare me. Sometimes he writes stories too. In this story, with a somewhat unpronounceable title (you’ll see why), he combines writing and drawing with terrifying results, to show us a most unnatural creature indeed.
One morning, beside the eggs and toast, there’s a dark spot on the tablecloth, and where it came from, no one knows. The only certainty is that the moment one stops looking at it, it moves. And as it moves, it grows….
Stats
Inksplot, AKA Blot and *, is perhaps Gahan Wilson’s best known short story, appearing first in 1972 in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions. The story is only 15 pages long with 1.5 of those pages as graphics. The story appeared again as the first story featured in Unnatural Creatures by Neil Gaiman.
My Thoughts...
Anything and everything is scary if you look hard enough. Even a ink spot on a blotter. A seemingly innocent ink splotch, a smirch, a smear and a smudge. What if it moved from one space to another. Appearing on the wall, the floor, eventually on the dog? What does one do with an unnatural creature like a blot that keeps getting bigger and bigger. Do you run? Read this very entertaining story and get a glimpse into what a very proper English gentlemen did.
Also here are some comics from Gahan Wilson - Most featured in Playboy Magazine.
About The Author
Gahan Wilson is an author, cartoonist, and illustrator in the United States.
Wilson’s cartoons and illustrations are drawn in a playfully grotesque style, and have a dark humor that is often compared to the work of The New Yorker cartoonist and Addams Family creator Charles Addams. But while both men sometimes feature vampires, graveyards and other traditional horror elements in their work, Addams’s cartoons tended to be more gothic, reserved and old-fashioned, while Wilson’s work is more contemporary, gross, and confrontational, featuring atomic mutants, subway monsters, and serial killers. It could be argued that Addams’s work was probably meant to be funny without a lot of satirical intent, while Wilson often has a very specific point to make.
His cartoons and prose fiction have appeared regularly in Playboy, Collier’s Weekly, The New Yorker and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. For the last he also wrote some movie and book reviews. He has been a movie review columnist for The Twilight Zone Magazine and a book critic for Realms of Fantasy magazine.
His comic strip Nuts, which appeared in National Lampoon, was a reaction against what he saw as the saccharine view of childhood in strips like Peanuts. His hero The Kid sees the world as a dark, dangerous and unfair place, but just occasionally a fun one too.
Wilson also wrote and illustrated a short story for Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. The “title” is a black blob, and the story is about an ominous black blob that appears on the page, growing at an alarming rate, until… He has contributed short stories to other publications as well; “M1” and “The Zombie Butler” both appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and were reprinted in Gahan Wilson’s Cracked Cosmos.
Additionally, Gahan Wilson created a computer game titled Gahan Wilson’s The Ultimate Haunted House, in conjunction with Byron Preiss. The goal is to collect 13 keys in 13 hours from the 13 rooms of a house, by interacting in various ways with characters (such as a two-headed monster, a mad scientist, and a vampiress), objects, and the house itself.
He received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1981, and the National Cartoonist Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
Gahan Wilson is the subject of a feature length documentary film, Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird, directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe.
