Gleefully satirical Portland cartoonist John Callahan dies

Often controversial artist mostly turned tragedy into laughs

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, Jul 25, 2010, Updated Jul 26, 2010 (8 Reader comments)

Portland cartoonist/artist/musician John Callahan is shown here in 2001 with his pug, Annie, who often was a source of inspiration for his cartoons. Callahan died July 24 at age 59.

Tribune file photo

Portland cartoonist, author, musician and man about town in a wheelchair John Callahan died on July 24. He was 59.

Callahan, a quadriplegic who was paralyzed by an automobile accident, poked fun at himself and life in his frequently politically incorrect drawings, writings and songs. He and his large black wheelchair were often seen in Northwest Portland, where he spent much of his adult life.

He died at Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital from complications due to his paralysis.

Callahan was adopted as child and had five siblings. He frequently talked and wrote about his struggles with alcohol as a teenager and young adult. He admitted being drunk in the 1972 accident that left him paralyzed at the age of 21. He continued drinking for six more years, when he gave up alcohol and began drawing cartoons with a pen held between both hands.

Callahan’s cartoons have been compared to those of Charles Adams and Gahan Wilson. Two animated cartoons have been based on his work, including Pelswick, a children's show on Nickelodeon, and Quads, a Canadian-Australian co-production. A biographical movie starring Robin Williams has been proposed but never completed.

Portland writer David Milholland published many of Callahan’s earliest cartoons in his former publication, Clinton St. Quarterly.

Here is what Milholland wrote about Callahan after learning of his death:

John Callahan is adopted by a Catholic family in The Dalles, Oregon soon after his birth to a young, unmarried Catholic woman in nearby Portland. Mrs. Callahan, unfruitful to that moment, almost immediately becomes pregnant and soon thereafter turns out a full complement of siblings.

"The young Callahan, with his life-long mane of red hair, sets a quick pace for his provincial western community – a mischief maker from an early age. In one of several cartoon features we publish in Clinton St. Quarterly, John is pictured stabbed with a fork, as are all his five siblings, for breaking house rules laid down by their no-nonsense father.

Exaggeration? No, artistic license refined to a high pitch early in his career.

Another CSQ feature captures the recent high school graduate working in the local mental hospital, now Columbia Gorge Community College. John and his late-night-shift colleagues learn all about and experiment with the psychotropic medicines they dose out, administer electro-shock therapy, befriend and befuddle their essentially incarcerated wards.

No wonder that John early on dials into abusive alcohol consumption. This depressing work makes any vision for the future far from appealing. His tales of bravado under the influence, staple yarns of extended adolescence, catch the fancy of his peers stimulating even wilder bacchanals and near-mythic fables.

But this cycle fades away. The true opening of John’s bildungsroman takes place on a Los Angeles freeway off-ramp when John and a drunken-driver buddy flip and pile into oblivion. In the cartoon version, before discovering that he’s paralyzed for life, John tells the attending patrolman, “There’s a five-dollar bill in my left shirt pocket, get me a short case.”

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