Gary Panter

It’s difficult to believe  that Gary Panter’s now in his sixties. He still carries the image of a brattish punk rocker,  producing art that tapped into  the Californian New Wave in much the same way as Jamie Reid’s came to summarise a whole generation of  earlier, British music.

In reality, Panter’s always been a much more wide ranging artist than that. He was one of the defining figures of the alternative comics movement in the 1980s, but also was present in the art gallery scene and commercial art. He may have started in the underground but soon became establishment. Here’s the proof: a lavish and expensive slipcased edition holding two hardcover volumes that form a retrospective of his art.

Volume one is a summation of his public work. There are paintings, drawings, record covers, comics, architectural models, toys, and a rag bag of very early art from his formative years. For all its diversity, the images and themes remain constant. Here you’ll find wide-eyed anime characters,  wrestlers, katakana, scenes from the wild west, dinosaurs, images that could have come from  1930s pulp magazines or Mexican B-movies, reproduced in dayglo colours and drawn with  blocky, jagged lines.  As with many others of his generation, he’s uncritical about the sources of his inspiration. At the start of Panter’s career, this seemed novel, even subversive, but that element’s gone.  For all its outward spikiness, there’s a soft, almost cute element to the art that undoubtedly raised his commercial profile. How else would his designs have been so appropriate for Pee Wee Herman’s TV show? Or how could he have produced figurines of his most iconic character, Jimbo?  Not that Panter has ever disguised this aspect of his work.  Speaking about his friendship with Matt Groening, he says, “Disney and Zappa and Crumb and Picasso and the whole nine yards loomed large for us.” That’s part of his work’s charm, of course.

Of the pieces produced here, most space is devoted to his paintings. These are all about colour and form.  Images bleed and overlap and are repeated in sequence, in a variety of different colours. Many have a sly humour: one painting, of a Jetsons-style futuristic car, is entitled “Half Diverted By A Persistent Squeak”.  Seen in a gallery context they’re huge, brash and lurid, and that’s the point.  Squashed into the confines of a book though, they lose much of their impact, and are reduced to illustrations. More successful, in terms of reproduction, are the black and white drawings, closer in size to their original proportions so more successfully reproduced. They’re also darker in tone, as though limiting his palette to black and white also polarises his vision.  These are heavily influenced in the beginning by Savage Pencil, and I’m especially fond of the hyperactive, almost cubist drawings from the early 80s, which was also the period that he made his name in RAW and other comics of the time.

Oh yes, comics, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? There’s a slim selection available, mainly concentrating on his Jimbo comics, and what appears to be a fairly random selection of other works. Panter says he sees himself primarily as a painter, but that “comics… remain…a second home for me”, at which point you’re not sure whether to be grateful or resentful.  For me, Panter’s comics are where his art seems most remarkable, truly radical when seen in the context of other,  more conservative artists.  Jimbo is his most iconic character, which may be why the work reproduced here draws primarily on selections from “Jimbo’s Inferno” and Jimbo in Purgatory”. They’re unsettling works that also contain elements of humour and great beauty and BUT are reproduced quarter size, which robs them of their narrative elements (unless you choose to read the text with a magnifying glass). It also means that you miss out on the evocative language he uses,  part Joyce and part Burroughs, as essential a part of the comics as the visuals.

If the first volume is public work, the second is his private, namely selections from his sketchbooks over a twenty five year period. These aren’t as essential as Crumb or Speigelman’s, but they offer an interesting glimpse into his creative processes.  Many of the selections here seem to have  been made to provide an insight into the paintings, although you can also trace the seeds of many of his comics in here (and indeed, there’s a higher proportion of comics on view in this volume, some of it almost identical to work that’s been published).  A fairly serious flaw is that the book is designed so that the fold coincides where the fold of the sketchbook would be.  I can see why they did this, but what it actually results in is partially obliterating the visibility of any drawings that spread over two pages, as they dip into the book’s folds.

This is a beautifully produced selection of Panter’s work, with some fairly apparent design flaws.  With a price tag of £70, I really couldn’t recommend it as a purchase to anyone but the most devoted fan. If you can pick up a copy cheaply though (I got mine for £20, including postage, from amazon.com) it’s well worth investigating, as an insight into the works of one of the comics medium’s most talented and unique practitioners.