As you know I have recently been honored to work on a graphic novel job in collaboration with legend Gary Panter. If you think you do not know his work, you're crazy (I mean, whhaat!??). In the 1980s, Gary Panter was the designer of crazy cool sets for "Pee-wee's Playhouse. You remember those pictures decorating the Pee Wee Place and trading cards. His illustrations for that landed him some emmys and his work has also appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and The New Yorker. He is considered one of the most important cartoonists to emerge in the late 1970s and '80s! According to some writers, he has flown under the art world's radar.
I missed this book signing event at SKYLIGHT! bummer:
Self-described "art nerd" Gary Panter is the graphic-art god best known for his iconic cartoon Jimbo and the ingenious design ofPee-wee's Playhouse. (Remember Chairy and Pterri?) His newest book is a collaboration with Brooklyn-based publisher PictureBox, a comprehensive look back at Panter's 30-plus years as the "King of Punk Art." The two-volume set includes a monograph of over 700 images, essays by art and music critics and the artist himself, and never-before-seen sketches. Los Feliz's Skylight Books hosts this event, which includes a slideshow and Q&A hosted by another modern graphic-art heavy:Simpsons creator Matt Groening
Just recently released: a two-volume catalog of Panter's work that PictureBox published last month-
and according to this article in the Boston Globe by By Greg Cook - read below
Panter's paintings are populated by cartoony B-movie he-men, busty gals with guitars or guns, cute critters, monsters, and robots wandering through rotting industrial landscapes, treacherous jungles, or stripped-down abstract backgrounds that might be read as caricatures of the plains of Panter's Texas youth.
Panter's style draws on bits of Dick Tracy, Jack Kirby's Marvel superheroes, psychedelic rock posters, Japanese monster movies, and Cubism. There's something Whitmanesque in his ravenous cataloging of our collective pop unconscious. Gender roles, sexuality, violence, heroism, failure, hopes, and fears get reflected back to us in a funhouse mirror. Still, as Pee-wee might say, the secret word is fun.
Panter imitates the look of cheap off-register print jobs and hand-painted Mexican street advertising with his repeated motifs, limited palette of bright acrylic colors, and outlines that don't quite line up with the colors underneath. In an era striving for perfection through technology, he embraces the flaws that in many ways define our humanity.
His drawing is deliciously crude, like something scrawled in the margins of a high schooler's notebook or the gloriously messy low-fi buzz of punk rock. In "Helioport" (2002), this becomes an almost completely abstract tangle of thorny red lines scratched out atop a pink and white background. Some works feature busy and seemingly unrelated line drawings layered one atop the other. His lines never flow; he builds up lots of short, jagged strokes that crackle like cartoon lightning. It's the opposite of Japanese art star Takashi Murakami's sleek, airless cartoon creations. Panter's work is raw, sweaty, unleashed, maybe unhinged.
But when Panter stumbles, we get random jumbles of cheesy characters in acid colors. Ink drawings from "Jimbo in Purgatory" (1997-2001), his ambitious comic-book reimagining of Dante's 14th century "Purgatorio," show Panter's trademark lunkhead Everyman, Jimbo, wandering a Purgatory populated by Frank Zappa, Boy George, Bruce Lee, Elvis, Alice Cooper, and Tiny Tim. "Duchamp set me free," Panter says in the catalog, "and now I'm running through the streets."
** In July I am getting flown over to NYC for the Comic Book Signing- and will let you know the details!
Til then you should go out and BUY his book:
