Rowland B. Wilson, Cartoonist, Animator
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Rowland B. Wilson, 74, Creator of Wry Cartoons, Is Dead
By Lily Koppel
Rowland B. Wilson, whose watercolor cartoons were instantly
recognizable to readers of Playboy, The Saturday Evening
Post, Esquire and The New Yorker, died on June 28 at Scripps
Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, Calif. He was 74 and lived
in La Costa, Calif.
The cause was heart failure, his daughter Megan Wilson said
in a statement. His sketches for a new cartoon for Playboy
were on his drawing board when he died, she said.
Long a mainstay of Playboy, Mr. Wilson's full-page color
panels were often playful but generally tamer than those of
fellow artists in the magazine. He enjoyed drawing dragons,
poker-playing reindeer and Santa Claus, whom he once
depicted, surrounded by elves, accepting an award "on behalf
of all the little people who did so much to make it
possible."
Mr. Wilson, a tall, slow-talking Texan, came to New York
during the golden age of Madison Avenue and worked as an art
director at Young & Rubicam. He tackled themes with clear
draftsmanship and what admirers viewed as a gentle
sensibility, though he acknowledged that his work took
effort. "Ideas are easy to come by," he said. "It's the
drawing that takes a long time."
Mr. Wilson's cartoons poked fun at the blandness of human
response to trauma and danger. "You think I'm obligated to
come across now, don't you, you male chauvinist pig!?" says
a disenchanted damsel to her exhausted knight and rescuer in
a Playboy cartoon. In another one, an airplane pilot's view
of the landscape is a Monopoly board.
"These poor humans have no idea what is happening to them,"
said Michelle Urry, the cartoon editor at Playboy. She
worked with Mr. Wilson, whose relationship with the magazine
began in 1967.
Some of Mr. Wilson's best work appeared in a popular
advertising campaign for New England Life Insurance, which
he produced while living in Weston, Conn. Distinctive for
their representations of impending disaster, the situations
in Mr. Wilson's cartoons were like clownish screams of
warning in a silent film. In one, a wrecking ball at a
Manhattan construction site swings toward a glass-walled
corner office, where a smug executive reclines in his chair,
his back to the wall, as he discusses his insurance coverage
on the phone.
In the early 1970's, Mr. Wilson moved to London, where he
worked in animation. After returning to the United States,
he was an animator on the Disney films "The Little Mermaid,"
"The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "Tarzan" and "Hercules." He
was awarded a daytime Emmy for his animation on "Schoolhouse
Rock!" His cartoon collection, "The Whites of Their Eyes,"
was published in 1962.
Rowland Bragg Wilson was born in Dallas on Aug. 3, 1930. As
a child, he spent Saturdays at the movies and, afterward,
practiced drawing at the kitchen table. He received a
bachelor's degree in fine arts from the University of Texas
and did graduate work in art history at Columbia University.
Mr. Wilson's first marriage, to Elaine Libman, ended in
divorce. In addition to his daughter Megan, a commercial
artist in Manhattan, he is survived by three other daughters
from his first marriage, also commercial artists, Amanda
Wilson of Piedmont, N.Y.; Reed Wilson of London; and Kendra
Wilson of Leicestershire, England. He is also survived by
his second wife, Suzanne Lemieux Wilson, an artist; and
three grandchildren.