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GARY PANTER: I got out of school.
I worked as a janitor in an office building.
And I worked as a color separator, which was good, at
a printing place.
But I couldn't get any art--
I couldn't get anything going with the galleries.
They were nice to me, but they didn't know what
to do with my stuff.
And I couldn't get commercial illustration work.
So I just left town, got my pickup, and drove to LA.
And I just went around with my book and got illustration work
and album cover artwork and stuff.
-The differences in styles that show up, just even from
panel the panel in the comics--
is that something naturally that happens?
Because sometimes, it'll just be suddenly very
clean out of nowhere.
The lines will be--
GARY PANTER: Yeah.
I thought it was interesting to mix up styles, because it's
really easy for me to change style.
And so that was kind of earlier, usually.
And also, I was trying to attract attention.
You're young and just like, gee, look at me, everybody.
I can draw like this and that.
But it also was kind of like pairing the style to the
emotion in the panel, in a way--
trying to go along with that.
And so I've done projects all different styles.
And now, typically, an issue of a comic is more like one
style throughout, in a way, though it might gradually
tighten or something like that.
I'll do games like that, where the style might subtly change
in an issue.
But I like doing it.
It's fun.
And it comes from just wanting to absorb all
of my heroes' work--
and Jack Kirby and all those English pop artists and stuff.
-Is there a set point where Jimbo came from?
GARY PANTER: Yeah, I drew him one time in 1974 when I was
still at the end of college.
I was doing stream of consciousness comics.
But then I was studying cargo cults and stuff.
And I was trying to figure out a way to tell stories.
And I just drew his head.
And I went, wow, that looks kind of like Dennis the Menace
and Joe Palooka and various other things.
I don't know.
It stuck.
The first time I drew it, I knew it was something.
Even though it wasn't my favorite thing or anything, it
just emerged, like OK, I'm here.
And so then, I started drawing my first long stories that
really had beginnings, middles, and ends--
and a lot of them unpublished, thankfully.
So my comics, come back from a show-- where do you put
massive amounts of framed stuff?
-Are these the Purgatory ones?
GARY PANTER: Yeah, that's the Purgatory pages.
Yeah.
It took about a month to draw, each page.
[INAUDIBLE], do you like it?
-Because you did one panel a night, correct?
GARY PANTER: That's what I tried to do.
I could just do about five square inches a night.
And then I had to just keep doing.
It takes a long time to draw, so this was a crazy comic.
Then I've got--
these are older ones that are big pages.
-Is that from--
GARY PANTER: This is from the pantheon book, I think.
Yea.
I drew about 20 new pages for that pantheon collection.
-And how did you get involved with like people from Slash
Records and Slash Magazine?
GARY PANTER: I was walking down Gower Gulch one night,
and there was a Slash Magazine laying on the news stand.
And it was the sensibility I'd been doing, which was big,
crude graphic stuff that's probably out of fine art type
stuff-- like Rauschenberg and Schwitters and all
that kind of stuff.
I'd seen something in the paper about punks, and I
thought, these are like creepy little neo Nazis--
what a bunch of jerks.
But mostly, it was people out of art school who wanted to
make something happen and had a sense of humor.
And they were all looking for interesting records.
And then when I went to the first Slash parties,
everyone's singing along with these English imports.
And I'm like, gee.
What station do you turn to find out-- are you going to
have to have a ticket to England or something to find
out about this?
-How do you feel about colorizing your work?
GARY PANTER: Well, adding a layer of color is different.
I like it just in black and white.
And so when we're coloring it, I'm going to
keep it really simple.
I could totally do paintings under each one of them, but
black and white comics is kind of enough, in a way.
So this will be some tint overlay, I guess, on this one.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'd been in LA about 10 years.
And it was time to go.
-That's about the same time that
"Pee-Wee's Playhouse" started.
GARY PANTER: Yeah, I accidentally moved here when
the TV show was sold to CBS.
-Where did the ideas for the set come from?
Were those developed through the course of the old
theatrical?
GARY PANTER: It's funny, because the theatrical set was
super simple.
There's almost nothing there.
But it has this ragged outline on top and pastel colors and
some spray painted patterns and this irregular door.
And it drove people crazy.
They really responded to it in this giant way.
But that was with no budget.
Then when we had a real budget, we could go crazy.
But it's all done in a giant rush.
So it's not finely tuned or anything.
The first day at work, I start to read the scripts, because
you have to read the scripts to find out what needs to be
portrayed or where things happen in
relation to each other.
And the tank commander guy walks over to me and goes,
where's the plans?
All the carpenters are standing here ready to build
everything.
It's like, well, that wasn't great planning.
You just have to give us 15 minutes to design this thing.
So we just always were staying up 24 hours a day until we're
just completely stupid.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
GARY PANTER: When I was a kid, I always wanted to
do stuff like that.
So it was like, here's my chance.
But then when you interact with real companies, then they
have the way they do things, the thing they want to do, and
then there's the thing that Paul and I would like to do.
And a lot of things we wanted to do, people wouldn't to do
because they cost a little bit more money to do or they had
their own plan.
-Did you have any friction as far as style goes?
Because it's completely unlike anything that I remember, as a
kid, watching up to that point.
GARY PANTER: Well, this was like the hippie dream.
And it was the psychedelic--
it's a psychedelic show.
And it's also a show made by artists, because Ric Heitzman,
Wayne White, my co-designers, and then all the fantastic
people at Broadcast Arts and the companies--
they were all artists, and we put art history
all over the show.
It's really like--
I think Mike Kelley said, and I think it's right-- that its'
kind of like the Googie styles.
It's like those LA type of coffee shops and stuff, but
psychedelic, over the top.
I do think that the environment and design can
totally enhance your brain power and stuff.
You see nurseries that are designed like
ellipsis and things.
Yeah.
So we were working on deadening
everybody around here.
-Can you explain what you did with the Paramount Hotel,
along those lines?
GARY PANTER: Yeah.
It was a daycare center.
It was tiny.
That place, that room--
I don't know if you were there-- but it was about as
big as the kitchen.
It's like a little room.
But I used mirrors and paint to make it seem a lot bigger.
Then I did things that were like things I
saw on bad acid trips.
It wasn't stuff I want to put in my work, but it would work
in "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" and the kid's room, in some ways.
They're more like bad acid trips in some ways.
-Are those Emmys?
GARY PANTER: Yeah.
Nominated five times-- won three.
-What, is the third just tucked away?
GARY PANTER: My mom has it in Texas.
-Ah.
GARY PANTER: Yeah.
Yeah, I don't show my art much, because they're afraid
it's creepier than it this.
It's not very creepy, but they're always afraid it's
going to be creepy, so I don't bother them with it.
But an Emmy, they can understand.
It's like, OK.
And I sent them the big book and they were kind of
disturbed by it.
Maybe I shouldn't have sent it to them.
But how do you not send your parents a book like that?
Here, I achieved something.
Oh, OK.
Maybe you'd better try again.
Try harder.
[LAUGHS]
Couldn't you do a nice book?
It's always fun to see people's records.
-This is, in fact, very true.
GARY PANTER: My friend Devin are performing music--
trying to.
-That's Devin Flynn, right?
GARY PANTER: Yep.
-Do you guys have a name for your project?
GARY PANTER: Devin and Gary.
We have an ecstatic piece record coming out.
-Oh, really?
GARY PANTER: It's a 30-minute CD called "Devin and Gary Go
Outside." And I enjoy it.
But I'm kind of faking my way through it.
We performed at the Cake Shop the other not and
totally froze up--
I did.
And it was complete hell.
And all of my lyrics just vanished.
And it was like, oh, I thought I knew the songs.
But now, they're far away.
And we just suffered through it.
And no one seemed to notice.
-Is it basic guitar stuff?
GARY PANTER: I play guitar and sing.
And then Devin plays bass, keyboards, and sound effects.
And he makes--
we're running through a lot of petals and stuff.
Every sound is running through something.
So there's a sonic environment, in a way.
-And when did you start doing the light shows?
GARY PANTER: I did it for about a year for
a few hundred people.
Then I did it at Pierogi Gallery after 9/11.
About a year after 9/11, I did about 50 shows there.
And Joshua White cane.
And the years were--
I'm not sure--
2002 or something.
And then thereafter, Josh and I have been
working on light shows.
These bottles--
Josh was here last week.
And he's doing a week of light shows on the
Gowanus Canal next week.
And so one of the tricks with light shows is getting
colorful oils that are very pure, high density colors.
But we mix these pigments out of super strong aniline dyes.
We wear masks and gloves and stuff.
And so anyway, Josh was here mixing up colors for the next
light shows.
But we have pigments left over from his show in the '60s.
And we have custom built overhead projectors that he
built back then-- or that he had built.
So that's been a real trip, because he was one of my
heroes from the '60s.
And the little tiny light show attracted him, in a way.
-That's interesting.
GARY PANTER: So that's kind of interesting.
Doing little things, prototypes, is really cool
sometimes.
-One thing that's interesting is just how complicated
figuring out all these lights show-- that it seems really
simple when it's up.
GARY PANTER: It's fugitive in that we don't have a theater
that we're set up in all the time.
If you get installed in a theater
and you have a budget--
at the Fillmore East, he had like eight or 10 people
working with him.
He had a woman that mixed all-- and people, they went
all over the world to find the right pigments and just kept
experimenting.
And we've applied for grants and.
Stuff and Josh is really working on it.
So we might end up with a theater sometime, or Josh
should be in a theater.
I would definitely support whatever he wants to do.
Overheat--
they're the company that's releasing the
record from the '80s.
They put out my LP, which I have here somewhere.
This is it--
"Pray for Smurf." And this is going to be called "Smurfy
Beaver Shot," but Matt Groening talked me out of it.
And here's me on a painting over my car in my
back yard in LA.
So anyway, finally, that'll come out with a freak flag.
And then Devin Flynn and I-- our record's coming out.
-Awesome.
GARY PANTER: Two records for a non-musician.
[LAUGHING]
GARY PANTER: (SINGING) You get brighter every day and every
time I see you.
-Those are all the original Dal Tokyo?
GARY PANTER: Yeah.
Now, they want me to do color.
They've asked-- they have a color option sometimes.
And I've been drawing it for a reggae magazine called
"Riddim" in Tokyo for--
I don't know--
15 years or something, monthly.
And so the first 200 of them will come out next year from
Phantographics.
But my wife and I have to slow up long enough to do--
she designs the books and I have to help.
-So was painting--
come first?
Or would that alternate with drawing when you were a kid?
GARY PANTER: Yeah.
I could always draw.
So it's easier to draw.
To paint, then you have to learn.
When I was a little kid, I got the water color set, and it
was like, those little brushes are horrible.
And you're like, ew, this is awful.
And I really started painting seriously in high school--
painting big canvases in the garage, six by eight foot
canvases and stuff.
And my father's a cowboy and Indian painter.
And so I was an art nerd.
It looked like Gram Sutherland or anything I liked.
I was just absorbing everything.
Picasso was always a big influence, and pop artists,
and especially the English pop artists.
Ed Ruscha was always a big influence--
the California pop artist.
When I moved into this little room instead of being in a
giant studio, I was painting paintings that
were about this size.
And so for me, it's easy for me to paint
on hollow core doors.
And then when the paintings are done,
I'll cut this in half.
And then I'll re-stretch these on panels.
And this will be a little bit shorter, a little bit thinner.
And I have wider doors and things, so I can reformat them
after I paint them.
And so I'm thinking--
when I'm painting the painting, I'm knowing that I'm
going to lose an eighth of an inch off the top and bottom.
I do certain kinds of drawings that are going to
head towards paintings.
And they're meant to be-- they're either plans for
paintings themselves or they're things I photocopy and
then re-collage, and that becomes a painting.
I'm just kind of riffing.
-One thing that I think stands out about you is that there's
not this negative, overbearing anti-materialist feel to it.
And maybe I'm just getting it wrong.
GARY PANTER: No.
I'm not political that way.
Certainly, I don't litter.
I try not to litter.
But I still use five tons of plastic a year.
No, there's all kinds of subtext in them.
They're pretty positive in some ways.
It's weird world.
It's a world that's really cool and has really happy
babies in it.
And then it has really unhappy babies in it.
And so I'm doing a hieroglyph about humanity's detritus, in
a way, or however you pronounce the word.