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Oh, I was so excited to meet cartoonist extraordinaire Gary Panter in 1995 at the San Diego Comic Con! I was also grateful to be introduced by Gary Leib, another great cartoonist, who "primed the pump" a little by telling Panter that I wrote for a magazine and loved doing long, fawning profiles of my favorite artists.
I still love Gary Panter's work. It's esoteric to the max; I imagine to some it just looks like a mess. You'd think, with my love for Bushmiller and Lichtenstein, that I wouldn't find much to like in Panter's scratchy, jumbled work, but you would be wrong. Just because his style is chaotic doesn't mean it lacks focus. Poke around his web site and be impressed. He is one of the few artists to really demolish the imagined barrier between comics and "fine" art.
Gary headed the design team which created Pee Wee's Playhouse, and he received two Emmy Awards™ for his efforts, well merited in my opinion. I brought up my love for Pee Wee while talking to him (it was at a low ebb in popularity at the time), and imagine my jaw dropping to the floor as he casually dashed off the drawing above for me while we were chatting. Pee Wee is still using his designs today! That's endurance.
The moral of this story is: get into Gary Panter.
1 comment:
...first ran into Gary Panter's work via punk posters around LA — the energy was eye-catching, also so glad PeeWee is back. Yay!
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