John Callahan, Cartoonist, Dies at 59
Matthew Kruk
July 28, 2010
John Callahan, Cartoonist, Dies at 59
By BRUCE WEBER
John Callahan, a quadriplegic, alcoholic cartoonist whose work in
newspapers and magazines made irreverent, impolitic sport of both people
with disabilities and diseases and those who would pity and condescend
to them, died Saturday in Portland, Ore. He was 59 and lived in
Portland.
The causes were complications of quadriplegia and respiratory problems,
said his brother Tom.
Like his friend Gary Larson, the creator of "The Far Side," Mr. Callahan
made drawings with a gleeful appreciation of the macabre as it exists in
everyday life. He was, however, a man who lived his whole 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."
Bemused by the culture of confession and self-help fostered by the likes
of Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera and others, he was uninclined, in his
work, to be outwardly sympathetic to the afflicted or to respect the
boundaries of racial and ethnic stereotyping, and 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 the drawing of
the 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."
There was the drawing of a bartender refusing to serve a man who had
prosthetic hooks for hands. "Sorry, Sam," the bartender says. "You can't
hold your liquor."
There was the drawing of an aerobics class for quadriplegics, with the
instructor saying, "O.K., let's get those eyeballs moving." There was
the drawing of a sheriff's posse on horseback surrounding an empty
wheelchair. The caption gave him the title of his 1990 autobiography:
"Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot."
At the peak of his 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
a self-destructive 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 childish, comic-book-like images.
Mr. Callahan often defended his work with a shrug, saying simply that he
thought it was funny. But he also said 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 children of their own. He grew up in
the Dalles, about 80 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River; went
to 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 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. Eventually he earned a B.A. from
Portland State University. At the time of his death he was enrolled in
the university's 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 memoir, "Will the
Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?" His work was adapted for two
animated television series featuring disabled characters: "Pelswick," a
family-appropriate show about a boy in a wheelchair determined to live a
normal life, and "John Callahan's Quads," an envelope-pushing 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 in an interview 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."