One cartoon displays an aerobics instructor telling quadriplegic exercisers, “OK, lets get those eyeballs moving.” Another shows a man sitting at a bar with two prosthetic hooks for hands as the bartender tells him, “Sorry, Mike, but you can’t hold your liquor.”
John Callahan, 59, the cartoonist, died Saturday in Portland, Ore. He was a recovering alcoholic and a quadriplegic, and his work attracted a devoted following and many detractors who found it tasteless. That was the point.
“I’m happiest when I’m offensive,” he told The Miami Herald in 1989. “I want to move people out of the suburbs of their mind. I want them to suffer, to feel something real.”
His quadriplegia, the result of a liquor-fueled car accident at 21, was a “carnival of horrors,” he said. Its complications caused his death.
