Art Class #15 (John Callahan)

I told him once I envied him.  He thought that was funny.  So, I explained. 

He said so much in so few words and the art seemed to flow from him.

From December 7, 1988. – JDW

“My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands,” John Callahan said. “Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled.  All the pity and the patronizing.  That’s what is truly detestable.”

Who is it – George Carlin, I think – who talks about vuja de?  You ever had that experience?  You know, the strange feeling you are now in a space you’ve never ever previously encountered in this or any other lifetime.

Me, too.  That’s just how I felt when I got this letter from one of my closest amigos, the ever erratic and erudite Barker Ajax.  It’s his report about an interview he did for me with Portland’s finest cartoonist.  John Callahan covers more ground than that, according to Barker.  Apparently, Callahan is a piece of work.

Dear Jack D. –

You know, it’s not like he’s paralyzed on purpose now, is it?  And it’s not like he’s weird and cynical and driven and open and creative and unique and talented on purpose.  You see, it’s just like… that’s who John Callahan is.  He is who he is.  He can’t help himself, if that’s the way he is.  He couldn’t be any other way.  Stage whisper: And I wouldn’t want him to be any other way.

(Doesn’t your back crawl, like someone’s scratching a blackboard or sucking a cold wet terry towel, when you hear that expression?)

Anyway, I love the way Callahan exposes himself to his readers, the way he lets me see into his mind.  I get a big kick outta that warped, almost child-like view he has of the world.  I’m a fan.  Have been for a long time.

And then I walked into a dark ground-level Northwest neighborhood apartment about the size of a 32-foot Chris Craft Overnighter, the House of Callahan.  His actual lair.

I was surprised at the humble setting.  I had expected something more Stephen Kingish.  King’s the guy you’ve never really read because you are already too scared to even start one of his books.  Now that’s my idea of a horror writer.

I am here to tell you I walked into Callahan’s home expecting much more of it and a lot less of him.  This is clearly good.  It’s my fault I was surprised, but I’ve already figured that out, thank you.

The first thing I found out about Callahan is that he has a compulsion to draw and communicate.  It’s easy to understand why he’s so compelled.  He understands it himself.

“It’s my way of asking people if I’m worth something,” he told me.  I told you he was open.  He also conceded “it’s probably not too healthy” to invest so much of his self-worth in his work.  And then he showed me a drawing he had just completed.  I could see he was looking for approval.  I gave it to him.  It was a funny cartoon.

Callahan seems to be the purest artist I’ve ever met.  It’s almost like he’s channeling for someone else.  The work just pours out of him.  “What makes me click is creativity,” he explained.  “It’s sort of a curse.”  Actually, what I thought I heard was that message from the depths of every truly creative human, that cry from the guts of his or her being that screams I AM SPECIAL.

Callahan, the one name is sufficient as far as I’m concerned.  Like Sade.  Or Iman.  Maybe as big as Charo.  Almost that big.  Cuchi-cuchi.

Where was I?  Oh, mind you, Callahan is not a name that comes up on my list of guys you want to go jogging with or go drinking with, or argue politics.  Except perhaps to change his mind with reason.

He is not a man you want as jury foreman if you’re ever tried for an assault on an old lady or some other innocent.  Not that all old ladies are innocent.  No, not by any means.  And you know who I’m talking about.

Of course, that day I could tell he was about a quart-and-a-half low.  It had been raining for maybe ninety-six (96) consecutive hours in a row, one right after another, and it was practically pitch-dark at noon.  Callahan admitted he gets a little crotchety when the sun don’t shine.

Other than that, he seems like he is a man of great strength.  And clarity.  I don’t really think he always knows what he’s doing or drawing or writing or talking about.  However, I will remain convinced – unless I see different – Callahan is one helluva guy.

And the news is about to get out.  As you well know, John is a regular in about twenty-five newspapers across the country.  His cartoons appear in Penthouse, Omni, National Lampoon, Hustler, Cosmopolitan, and the Utne Reader.  He has sold his work to The New Yorker, and he’s recently been picked up by Harper’s.  Roll that over your tongue a few times.  Feels good.  Picked up by Harper’s.  Pinch me now.

In April, Mother Jones will publish a complete chapter of his autobiography.  That’s right.  William Morrow will have a hardcover out this spring, entitled Do Not Disturb Any Further, which will be a compilation of a couple hundred of Callahan’s greatest hits.  Oh, yeah, and this probably won’t surprise you, there’s a line of Callahan coffee mugs, calendars and posters appearing in stores by next summer.

I’m trying to imagine sleeping on Callahan-licensed bed-sheets and pillow cases.  Wouldn’t that be bizarre?

I think it’s about time Callahan got the recognition he deserves.  He’s paid his dues.  He’s been cartooning seriously for five years.  His two-page story-in-pictures about alcoholism is nothing short of brilliant.  His large body of work is consistently thoughtful or thoughtless. Either way, it makes you stop and think, which is all it’s supposed to do.  And I find myself amused more often than not.

Callahan likes the intensity of drawing something on the edge.  He also told me he doesn’t set out to achieve anything other than to please himself.  Sounds to me like a sure-fire formula for success, don’t you think?  He’s not trying to reach the masses, just a smart mass here and another smart mass someplace else.

And, this is cute, Callahan is worried about his job.  “Somebody could always come along,” he said, “a little younger and a little sicker.”

Jack D., let me sum it all up for you this way: Callahan reminds me of Sam Shepard and Gary Larson.  And people who can’t take a joke should have to winter for eternity listening to Richard Simmons sing Christmas carols.

Give my best to Norman Louise.

Chow,

Barker

John Callahan, Cartoonist, Dies at 59

By Bruce Weber for The New York Times July 28, 2010

John Callahan, a quadriplegic, alcoholic cartoonist whose work in newspapers and magazines made irreverent, impolitic sport of people with disabilities and diseases and those who would pity and condescend to them, died on Saturday in Portland, Ore. He was 59 and lived in Portland.

The causes were complications of quadriplegia and respiratory problems, his brother Tom said.

Like his friend Gary Larson, creator of “The Far Side,” Mr. Callahan made drawings with a gleeful appreciation of the macabre that he found in everyday life. He was, however, a man who lived his life with disadvantages, some of them self-wrought, and he viewed the world through a dark and wicked lens.

“This is John, I’m a little too depressed to take your call today,” the message on his answering machine said. “Please leave your message at the gunshot.”

Looking askance at the culture of confession and self-help fostered by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera, he was not inclined in his work to be outwardly sympathetic to the afflicted or to respect the boundaries of racial and ethnic stereotyping. His cartoons were often polarizing: some found them outrageously funny, others outrageously offensive.

There was the drawing of a restaurant, the Anorexic Cafe, with a sign in the window saying, “Now Closed 24 Hours a Day.” There was one showing a group of confused-looking square dancers unable to respond to the caller’s instruction to “return to the girl that you just left,” with a headline reading, “The Alzheimer Hoedown.”

There was the drawing of a blind black man begging in the street, wearing a sign that read: “Please help me. I am blind and black, but not musical.” In another, a sheriff’s posse on horseback surrounds an empty wheelchair. The caption gave him the title of his 1990 autobiography: “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot.”

And there was the drawing of an aerobics class for quadriplegics, with the instructor saying, “O.K., let’s get those eyeballs moving.”

At the peak of its popularity, about a decade ago, Mr. Callahan’s syndicated work appeared in more than 200 newspapers around the world, and many of them got used to receiving letters of objection.

When a car accident in 1972 severed his spine, Mr. Callahan was already an alcoholic, having been a heavy drinker from the age of 12. He wasn’t driving, but the driver, whom he barely knew, was drunk when he smashed Mr. Callahan’s Volkswagen into a utility pole at 90 miles per hour. He was paralyzed from the diaphragm down and lost the use of many of his upper-body muscles, though he could extend his fingers and eventually, after therapy, hold a pen in his right hand. To draw, he guided his right hand slowly across a page with his left, producing rudimentary, even childlike images.

Mr. Callahan often defended his work with a shrug, saying simply that he thought it was funny, but he also said that people who were genuinely afflicted tended to be his fans.

“My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands,” he said in an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 1992. “Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and the patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.”

Mr. Callahan was born on Feb. 5, 1951; information about his biological parents was unavailable. As an infant he was adopted from an orphanage in Portland by David Callahan, an elevator manager for Cargill, the grain company, and his wife, Rosemary. They named him John Michael Callahan and subsequently had five more children.

Mr. Callahan grew up in the Dalles, the Columbia River city about 80 miles east of Portland; went to Roman Catholic school, where he grew deft at drawing caricatures of the nuns; graduated from a local high school; and went to work as an orderly at a state mental hospital and then in an aluminum plant. He described his young adulthood mostly as aimless days of work in between bouts of drinking. A friend, Kevin Mullane, said in an interview that the drinking came closer to killing him than the accident did.

“Ironically, the crash may have saved his life,” Mr. Mullane said.

Actually, Mr. Callahan continued to drink for several years until he joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1978. He eventually earned a bachelor’s degree from Portland State University and at his death was enrolled in its master’s program in counseling.

Mr. Callahan’s cartoons are collected in a number of volumes, including “What Kind of a God Would Allow a Thing Like This to Happen?!!” and “Do What He Says!: He’s Crazy!!!” He also wrote a second autobiography, “Will the Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?” His work was adapted for two animated television series: “Pelswick,” a family-appropriate show about a boy in a wheelchair determined to live a normal life, and “John Callahan’s Quads,” an adult show featuring a menagerie of characters with different disabilities, foul mouths and bad attitudes.

In addition to his brother Tom, Mr. Callahan is survived by his mother, Rosemary; two other brothers, Kevin, known as Kip, and Richard; and two sisters, Mary Callahan, known as Murph, and Teri Duffy. All live in the Portland area.

“Even as a teenager he’d sense things in other people, the way an impersonator would,” Tom Callahan said on Tuesday. “He’d make fun of his friends, his teachers, in cartoons, so I don’t think the accident was really responsible for his humor. I think it allowed him literary license, though, to get away with things he might not otherwise have.”

Yet Another Remembrance

Acerbic cartoonist whose work was suffused with angst

By Allan Sutherland for The Guardian. Tuesday, 17 August 2010.

In an interview with the small magazine Emergency Horse, the cartoonist John Callahan, who has died aged 59 of respiratory failure, stated: “I like everything that has to do with the extreme, with angst or suffering or intensity in life. My subjects are all very intense – religion, politics, disease. The real mild things in life I’m not interested in.” But what distinguished Callahan, a quadriplegic, was that he was genuinely funny about these subjects. A classic cartoon shows a sheriff and posse surrounding an empty wheelchair. The caption reads: “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot.”

Unable to control a pen single-handed, Callahan worked on a tablet on his knees, holding the pen with two hands and drawing from the shoulders. Like that other great humorist, the partially sighted James Thurber, Callahan succeeded in channelling his limitations to create a distinctive style in drawings peopled by characters that he described as “kind of demented, as I think most people are”.

As disability was his primary subject, Callahan frequently came under attack from the people he described as “self-righteous assholes who presume to defend the disabled”, and delighted in publishing these letters on his website.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Callahan was adopted by an Irish Catholic family at the age of six months. He grew up in the Dalles, a small port on the Columbia river. With a rigid ex-army father, and educated by nuns, he started to rebel. He showed a talent for illicit, often obscene, caricatures of teachers and classmates.

Aged 12, he stole a bottle of gin at his grandmother’s wake and thereafter descended rapidly into alcoholism. (He was later to blame this in part on having been sexually abused at the age of eight by a female teacher.) In 1972, he let himself be driven by a friend who was as drunk as he was, who hit a telegraph pole. Callahan’s spine was severed.

He continued drinking in rehab and afterwards, until in 1978 he had an epiphany, described in his autobiography: “I knew with utter certainty that my problem was not quadriplegia, it was alcoholism.” He went to counselling, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and never took another drink. (This journey was the subject of his 1989 animation I Think I Was an Alcoholic.)

In 1979, John enrolled in Portland State University, where he gained a bachelor’s degree in English. In 1981, he returned to cartooning, initially for Portland State’s student magazine, the Vanguard, and received his first hate mail after creating a drawing of a street beggar with a sign reading: “Please help me. I am blind and black but not musical.”

After graduating in 1983, he started submitting professionally and eventually sold to Penthouse a cartoon of a construction site with a sign: “WARNING! THIS AREA PATROLLED BY LESBIANS.” He was soon selling to magazines such as National Lampoon, Omni and Forum.

At this point, like many artists with disabilities, Callahan experienced problems balancing a fluctuating freelance income with welfare payments. But the rise of political correctness created an environment in which Callahan was able to flourish, with such gags as: “This is a feminist bookstore! There is no humour section!!!” His career kept growing, he found an agent, and was eventually syndicated in some 50 publications, winning the praise of such fans as Gary Larson, PJ O’Rourke, Matt Groening and Camille Paglia.

In 1989 he published a first volume of autobiography, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, followed in 1998 by Will the Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?

Callahan originated two television series. Pelswick, which ran from 2000 until 2002, was a children’s series about a 13-year-old wheelchair user. The cartoonist was creator and executive producer of John Callahan’s Quads (2001), a raucously politically incorrect series made by the Canadian animation house Nelvana.

For the last 12 months, Callahan had been dealing with complications from pressure sores, a constant danger for anyone with spinal cord injury. He is survived by his mother, Rosemary, three brothers and two sisters.

• John Michael Callahan, cartoonist, born 5 February 1951; died 24 July 2010