Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere by Hillary Chute

Author:Hillary Chute
Language: eng
Format: epub

Panter worked for CBS, creating enduring cultural icons for Pee-wee’s Playhouse that were deeply weird in addition to actually being famous. Paul Reubens, who played Pee-wee, had studied performance art at California Institute of the Arts, and approached Panter in 1979 to create a poster for his stage show. Panter continued to design the posters, sets, and puppets for Reubens as his fame grew, eventually becoming the head designer for Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The unique Panter-fueled aesthetic of his television show, wacky and yet intelligent, referencing older American popular culture yet tinged with the futuristic, made it a cultural benchmark (as major profiles around a 2016 Pee-wee movie affirmed, decades after the show became a smash). The show featured a veritable who’s who, including a young Laurence Fishburne along with Phil Hartman, S. Epatha Merkerson, and many others; Mark Mothersbaugh from the band Devo wrote its theme song. “It was a show made by artists,” Panter said. Panter won three Emmys, and was nominated for five more. (He sent his award statues to his mother back in Texas.) An essay published in the Daily Beast on the enduring significance of Pee-wee’s design suggests, “Instead of re-creating the heart of the twentieth century as a nightmare, it turned the best parts of those decades into a funky paradise.”

Panter and Groening both worked for major television networks in the late 1980s, and created new aesthetics for the mainstream. Eventually, so too did Pettibon. While he produced literally hundreds of zines from 1981 to 1992, he became an actual art world star in the 1990s. (Many of these zines are currently owned by MoMA, which also has exhibited objects from Pee-wee’s Playhouse.) In 2013, Christie’s sold an untitled acrylic, ink, and pastel image on paper—an image of a surfer amid dense waves, with Pettibon’s signature associative caption—for $1,575,000. Pettibon, along with artist William Kentridge, brought new attention in the contemporary art world to drawing as a practice and as a fine art object.

Punk thus turned a corner and became something else, something wider. The new era was marked, perhaps, by Panter’s appearance in Raw magazine, founded and edited by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. In 1980, the same year that Slash folded, Spiegelman and Mouly self-published Raw, a high-end oversize magazine, before it was picked up by Penguin, which opened a new era for comics and wider readerships. Panter’s first Raw cover, in 1981, won industry awards. It is a close-up image of a grimacing punk named X, in color, adapted from Panter’s black-and-white Okupant X, the experimental 1977 book that collapses television, science fiction, comics, and performance art references and styles. This issue of Raw carried an appropriate tagline: “The Graphix Magazine That Lost Its Faith in Nihilism.”

In 1989, for its inaugural issue with Penguin, Raw published Panter’s cover image of Nancy mashed up with Popeye mashed up with Picasso’s Cubist art—to name just one striking example of “recombinant art.” Panter’s artwork had by that point become closely associated with Raw, the game-changing magazine that made larger audiences than ever before take stock of comics.

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