-Gary Panter-
Texas-born illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician, Gary Panter is a child of the ’50s who blossomed in the full glare of the psychedelic ’60s and, after surviving underground during the ’70s, finally made his mark in the ’80s as head set designer for the successful kid/adult TV show Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a job which brought his jagged art and surreal cartoon ideas into the homes of America and bagged him three Emmy Awards. With Pee Wee, Panter created another world, a fantasy extension of his natural studio habitat which was constructed out of a collection of garbage and buried treasure. In the same way that Francis Bacon surrounded himself with images that inspired him to carve out his grotesques in oil paint, so Panter gathered around himself the rubble of his childhood to create Pee Wee and the host of lovable (yet strange) characters which inhabit his Playhouse.
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 hard core-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.
— Edwin Pouncy