Steve Clay Wilson (July 25, 1941 – February 7, 2021) was an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson attracted attention from readers with aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of lowlife denizens, often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers. He was an early contributor to Zap Comix. A striking feature of Wilson's work is the contrast between the literate way in which his characters speak and think and the depraved violence in which they engage. As James Danky and Denis Kitchen wrote in their book, Underground Classics, "He astonished and sometimes frightened his fellow cartoonists, though they saw it as pushing if not eviscerating the boundaries of taste. More than anyone, Wilson defined the boundaries of the medium." The artist and characters sometimes take violence with a playful attitude, for example getting tired of fighting and agreeing to have sex instead of continuing a battle. Wilson's later work became more ghoulish, featuring zombie pirates and visualizations of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a rotting vampire mother. In many respects, however, his work remained consistent with his emergence in the 1960s. In contrast to the many counterculture figures who moderated their more extreme tendencies and successfully assimilated into the mainstream of commercial culture, Wilson's work remained troubling to mainstream sensibilities and defiantly ill-mannered. Early life Wilson was on born on July 25, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska to Lydia (née Lewis) and John William Wilson. His mother was a medical stenographer, while his father was a machinist. He attended the University of Nebraska and later trained as a medic in the United States Army. He lived in Lawrence, Kansas and held odd jobs before moving to San Francisco in 1968. Career Early career Wilson's first published work was in , an underground newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, which was soon followed by drawings for Grist magazine, a poetry journal published by John Fowler. (According to Charles Plymell, an editor of Grist, Wilson's first published work was in 1966 in Grist #7 and then in Grist #9, also from that same year.) The first appearance of the Checkered Demon is said to have been in an ad in a later issue of Grist. His portfolio was printed the following year in 1967 (with subsequent printings later on in comic book form). Underground comix In California, Wilson met up with Charles Plymell, who was publishing Robert Crumb's