Gary Panter
Gary Panter (born 1950 in Oklahoma), known to many as the 'father of punk comics' is a fine artist and 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.
As an early participant in the Los Angeles punk scene in the 1970s, he 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).
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 is 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 should be seen as mutant escapees from Panter’s early work. Not so strange if one considers the two artists went to college together.
Panter also created the online series Pink Donkey for Cartoon Network.
He has recently published Jimbo in Purgatory, a lavishly produced surrealist graphic novel which incorporates classic literature elements (most prominently Dante’s Inferno) with pop and punk culture sensibilities.
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