Gary Panter

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Gary Panter (born December 1, 1950 in Durant, Oklahoma) is an illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician. Panter is a luminary of the post-underground, new wave comics movement that began with the end of Arcade: The Comics Revue and the initiation of RAW. Many consider him the second generation in American underground comix

Panter has published his work in various magazines and newspapers, including Raw, Time and Rolling Stone magazine. He has exhibited all over the world, and won two Emmy awards for his set designs for Pee-Wee's Playhouse. His most famous works include 'Jimbo, Adventures in Paradise' and 'Facetasm', which was created together with Charles Burns.

1 Style
2 Overview
3 Awards and honors
4 References

[edit] Style

Panter is known to many as the "father of punk comics" and the “King of the Ratty Line” due to his idiosyncratic, scratchy line work emblematic of the DIY aesthetic prominent in the work of many small press cartoonists. His comics are fast and hard and are drawn in an expressionistic manner.

[edit] Overview

Possibly the most influential graphic artist of his generation, a fact acknowledged by the Chrysler Design award he received in 2000, Gary Panter has been everything from an underground cartoonist to an interior designer (for a crèche inside the Philippe Starck-designed Paramount Hotel in New York) to an internet animator (his Pink Donkey and the Fly series can be seen online at Cartoon Network’s web site). He is also the creator of Jimbo, a post-nuclear punk-rock cartoon character whose adventures were first chronicled as a comic strip in the ’70s LA hardcore-punk paper Slash and later in RAW magazine. Although the inspiration for Jimbo was partly rooted in the ’60s underground comix movement, other influences such as Japanese monster movies, cheap commercial packaging, the work of Marvel Comics artist Jack Kirby, Mothers Of Invention house artist Cal Schenkel, and the writing of cult science fiction author Philip K. Dick leaked into the project. All of which gave Jimbo a startlingly fresh look that was subliminally familiar yet defiantly oddball.

Drawn with pen and black ink in his now familiar “ratty line” style, Panter’s work (like 'Andy Warhol’s before him) successfully broke down the barrier that separates “trash” from “art” and transformed underground comix into a viable art form. Equally ground-breaking were his extended comic novels Dal Tokyo and Cola Madnes (which has recently been published by Funny Garbage Press). Cola Madnes was created by Panter primarily for his Japanese audience (who named a café in Nagoya ‘Gary Panter Squar’ in his honor) using a manga-style two-panel-per-page layout that paid silent and respectful homage to the work of Toho Studios (creator of Godzilla) and comic book legend Jack “King” Kirby. Cola Madnes was Gary Panter’s artistic “holy mission” way back in 1983. A project that was spawned from sketch-book jottings to rise up phoenix-like 18 years later as a smouldering piece of graphic and literary art that deserves to be stacked alongside J.G. Ballard’s Crash and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

As an illustrator, Panter was one of the first to stop worrying about graphic perfection, preferring instead to push the underground punk attitude he had nurtured since the ’70s into his commercial art for established magazines such as Time, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker. By deliberately presenting his work with serrated edges instead of clean lines, Panter’s style came as a breath of fresh air to both publishers and audience alike. His fame as an illustrator grew when he was commissioned by Warner Brothers to produce a set of album sleeves for Frank Zappa. The resulting covers for Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites were universally admired (albeit initially not by Zappa himself), as was his cover illustration for the debut album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. H e also did the cover artwork for red hot chili peppers record 'the uplift mofo party plan'.

This enormous body of work has earned Panter the moniker of “King Of Punk Art” and roused fellow painter Robert Williams to dub him the “King Of The Preposterous”. To anybody unfamiliar with the world of Gary Panter, stepping into his ramshackle Brooklyn-based studio is akin to being injected directly into the artist’s brain, Fantastic Voyage-style, through the tip of a giant syringe. Once inside, the visitor is faced with a sprawling mass of artifacts from Panter’s past, present and future. An hallucinogenic stew of hippie posters, Rat Fink model kits, Japanese monster movies, punk rock artifacts and underground comix, all of which mirrors the passion, madness, psychedelic perversity and creativity which he pushes into the work that is hanging half-finished on the rust streaked walls. A series of acrylic paintings in progress, each sending juddering pools of acid color dancing across the grime and paint-smeared floor whenever the sun manages to beam a shaft of white light through the ugly cataract windows that are the bleary eyes of his studio. Happy-faced Martin Sharp magic daisy mutations unfold poisonous triffid petals, while a doe-eyed Walter Keane teen plucks at a lime green electric guitar, illuminated by a squiggling lava lamp that has come straight out of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. In another corner of the studio bake the spiked, severed heads of several Amazon natives, victims of a tribe of headhunters who have been wrenched from the pulped guts of some Men’s True Adventures magazine and sprayed on canvas where they now silently scream.

As an early participant in the Los Angeles punk scene in the 1970s, Gary Panter defined the grungy style of he era with his drawings for Slash magazine and numerous record covers. At the end of the decade he was hired by Warner Brothers to design the covers for three albums by Frank Zappa: Studio Tan (1978), Orchestral Favorites (1978) and Sleep Dirt (1979).

Some time around 1980, Panter's Rozz Tox Manifesto was published in the Ralph Records catalog, calling for artists to work within the capitalist system.

In the 1980s, he was the set designer for Pee Wee's Playhouse, where he changed the face of children's television, winning three Emmy Awards in the process. Prior to Panter's work, kid shows had a drearily lulling aesthetic: everything was round, cute, simplified, and pastel. The set of Pee-wee's Playhouse was the antithesis of pablum-art: it was dense as a jungle and jam-packed with surprises, often loud and abrasive ones.

While doing illustration and set designs, Panter kept up an active career as a cartoonist. His work in comics includes contributions to the avant-garde comics magazine RAW and the graphic novel Cola Madness. Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons TV show, once noted that Panter "applied his fine-art training to the casualness of the comic strip, and the result was an explosive series of graphic experiments that are imitated in small doses all over the world today". Groening himself, who went to college with Panter, can be seen as an example of a cartoonist who has learned much from Panter. The jagged smashed-glass rawness of The Simpsons (think of Lisa's hair) can be traced back to the post-apocalyptic world that Panter was sketching in the early 1980s. The Simpsons could be seen as mutant escapees from Panter's early work.

Panter also created the online series Pink Donkey for Cartoon Network.

He has recently published Jimbo in Purgatory, a lavishly produced graphic novel which incorporates classic literature elements (most prominently Dante's Inferno) with pop and punk culture sensibilities.

In 2006, his art graced the front cover of "The Friendly Rich Show" by Friendly Rich.

[edit] Awards and honors

With Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb and Chris Ware, Panter was among the artists honored in the exhibition "Masters of American Comics" at the Jewish Museum in New York City, New York, from Sept. 16, 2006 to Jan. 28, 2007.