Back in September, I was forced to postpone my in-progress feature suggestion for a new edition of Gahan Wilson's Nuts because my fellow collected-editions-advocate, Chris Mautner at Robot 6, beat me to it. So I decided to reschedule it for the month after I did a writeup for the big Playboy book, not knowing specifically when that would come, which I published two days ago.
Today, I was reading this very good interview with Wilson over at the Stranger, "Seattle's Only Newspaper," and found this exciting announcement from the artist:
"And then there is another thing coming up from [Fantagraphics], which I'm very happy about, which is a National Lampoon... They had a little section in the rear of the magazine, which was called The Funny Pages, and they had the more regular artists do little comic strips. And so I had this full-page thing, which was called Nuts. ... It dawned on me that one of the most really challenging, horrific adventures we go through is very early childhood. ... If you watch kids, they're humans. So they're really trying the best they can to understand and cope with this fantastic, mysterious thing—being alive. And they don't know anything about it. It's all a mystery to them—it's a mystery to all of us—but it's a total mystery to them. I mean, starting from how do you keep upright, things like that, to all kinds of complicated things happening in their presence and they can't figure out what is going on. But they have to somehow or other, they want to appear that they're functioning right and so on. So that's what my National Lampoon strip was about. There was a collection of it, oh, I don't know, 20 years ago. But the magazine closed—I wish some magazine like that still existed; we could use it—and so this will be The Complete Nuts. And so Fantagraphics will do their usual beautiful job. And I'm absolutely delighted. That'll be coming up next year."
So there, Reprint This! will take off the March feature because clearly nobody wants me to write up a feature on Nuts. They will either beat me to it or preempt me entirely. No complaints here! I'll resume March 10 for the monthly news-n-review column.
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