John Callahan, 1951-2010

“My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands. 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.”
-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 this weekend. Perhaps best known for his cartoon “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot, Callahan once told the New York Times Magazine

that he hoped to have children because, “I think it would be fun to hear the whir of little wheels around the house.” He was 59.