Gary Panter
Gary Panter is an American cartoonist, illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician. Panter's work is representative of the post-underground, new wave comics movement that began with the end of Arcade: The Comics Revue and the initiation of RAW, one of the main instigators of American alternative comics. The Comics Journal has called Panter the "Greatest Living Cartoonist".
While designing for television, he remained active in comics and illustration.
Exhibitions
With Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, Elzie Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, Panter was among the artists honored in the exhibition "Masters of American Comics" at the Jewish Museum in New York City, from September 16, 2006, to January 28, 2007.Panter has published his work in various magazines and newspapers, including Time and Rolling Stone, and in notable comics anthologies such as Raw, BLAB!, Zero Zero, Anarchy Comics, Weirdo, Kramers Ergot, and Young Lust. He has exhibited widely, and won two Daytime Emmy Awards for his set designs for Pee-wee's Playhouse. His most notable works include Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, Jimbo's Inferno, and Facetasm, the latter of which was created together with Charles Burns.
In 2010, the French publisher United Dead Artists released two volumes of his work: The Wrong Box and The Land Unknown.
Rozz Tox and graphic novels
In 1979, Panter's Rozz Tox Manifesto was published in the Ralph Records catalog, advocating for artists to engage the capitalist system. He also collaborated with Jay Cotton on Pee-Dog: The Shit Generation for the Church of the SubGenius.Panter's good friend Matt Groening said of Jimbo, "He and his friends are always up against systems of control... Jimbo is a wild combo-platter of brilliant drawing and stuff you didn't know could be done with mere pen and ink." Groening has also stated that Jimbo's spiky hair inspired the design of Bart Simpson.
Awards and honors
Panter was the recipient of the 2012 Klein Award, which was given by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art at their annual MoCCA Art Festival in New York.Style
Panter was influenced by, among others, Frank Zappa's art director Cal Schenkel. His comics are fast and hard, drawn in an expressionistic style. His work spans painting, commercial art, illustration, cartoons, alternative comix, and music.Use by music artists
commissioned Panter to paint the album covers for the unauthorized releases of Frank Zappa's albums Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites.Jimbo
- mostly a collection of strips that originally appeared in Slash, the Los Angeles Reader, and Raw; reissued by New York Review Books in 2021.
Personal life
From 1978 to 1986, Panter was married to writer Nicole Panter, who was the manager of Los Angeles punk rock band the Germs. He later married art director Helene Silverman.In 2025, Desert Island’s Eisner-nominated comics and art tabloid Smoke Signal published a solo issue of original work entitled “Flycatcher”. It was the first time in the publication’s 44-issue history than an artist drew an entire issue cover-to-cover.
In 2008, PictureBox published Gary Panter, a two-volume, 700-page retrospective including sketches and previously unpublished material.
Panter continued to publish alternative comics and graphic novels, including Cola Madnes and contributions to the avant-garde magazine RAW.