Overview
As an early participant in the Los Angeles punk scene in the 1970s, Gary Panter defined the grungy style of the era with his drawings for Slash magazine and numerous record covers.
Some time around 1980, Panter's Rozz Tox Manifesto was published in the Ralph Records catalog, calling for artists to work within the capitalist system.
In the 1980s, he was the set designer for Pee Wee's Playhouse, where he won three Emmy Awards. Prior to Panter's work, kid shows had a more 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 Madnes. 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 can be seen as 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 could be seen as mutant escapees from Panter's early work.
Panter also created the online series Pink Donkey for Cartoon Network.
He has recently published Jimbo in Purgatory, and Jimbo's Inferno, lavishly produced graphic novels which incorporate classic literature elements (most prominently Dante's Divine Comedy) with pop and punk culture sensibilities.
He was best friends with Matt Groening. From 1978 to 1986, Panter was married to Nicole Panter, who was the manager of the notorious Los Angeles punk rock band, The Germs.
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