Gary Panter: The Mr. Skin Interview

Your career in the visual arts has been a long, strange trip. Can you talk about what inspired you to pick up the pen and make a living scribbling?
My father is a very talented artist, and I've always got a lot of pleasure from making art. I can't do math, but I can draw.

As a child of the '60s, how much was that era's swinging movie scene influential to your development as an artist?
I was born in 1950, so Jayne Mansfield knocked my socks off. The girls in the Dracula movies were always hot, but especially after becoming the Brides of Dracula.

In the '60s, I was totally into surf, hotrod, monster, and Hercules and later hippy movies. All of those featured wonderful girls in skimpy outfits in distress. And all kinds of styles and fads and ideas filtered through Hollywood. It all had an effect on the way my mind is put together.

This is Mr. Skin and not Art Forum, so do you recall the first time you saw a sex scene in a mainstream movie growing up?
There were all kinds of adult messages that I didn't understand when I was a kid at the drive-in. There was more sexiness than sex scenes. In one of the Tammy movies there's a scene where the kids are swimming in flesh-colored bathing suits and the old busy-body neighbor thinks they are nude and causes a scandal. That's an early tame impression. Certainly whenever Monroe or Loren or Raquel or Jayne filled a screen it was undeniably something.

Barbarella had cartoon sex in it. The Graduate.

Name some of the actresses that made your teenage glands boil.
Mia Farrow and Twiggy I think are hot. Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3). Natalie Wood was unbelievably pretty. Ann-Margret, the female Elvis.

Do any present-day thespians get a rise from you?
I don't know the names of any of them. The princess from the Star Wars movie Natalie Portman where they are fighting the look-alike robots in the meadow. She's in a new movie about a young man finding himself and having it over his scary shrink dad. She is beautiful.

The Alien-killing vs. Predator-befriending girl at the South Pole impervious to chill. She is hot. The girl that hung out with Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean [Keira Knightley]. The Barbie-like girl in Starship Troopers [Denise Richards]. The lovely girls in Blade Runner. The lovely girls in Ghost World.

Are there specific dirty scenes in movies that are especially fond to you?
Rae Dawn Chong in Quest for Fire was pretty great (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3). Fellini's City of Women (Picture: 1 - 2) and Satyricon (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3) are two of my favorite movies. They are sexy movies.

There was a great tame sex scene in Catch as Catch Can, an Italian pop-art movie. The sex takes place in a giant soup can rolling down a hill and floating down a river.

I don't know if there was a sex scene in The Tenth Victim, but Ursula Andress (Picture: 1 - 2) is some kind of magic elixir.

Your work has a myriad of influences, from graphic arts to cult movies. For instance, there is an element of Japanese Godzilla movies present in your style. Did they have a big effect on your work? Can you name other movie genres that have inspired you?
Bad monster movies. Experimental movies. Arty movies. Westerns. Italian sunglass movies. Pop art movies. Terrible science-fiction movies. Action pictures. Movies with fops. Pirate movies. Car-chase movies. Running-from-the-fireball movies. Underwater hold-your-breath movies. Giant-carnivore movies. Kubrick's movies. Fellini's movies. Ken Russell's movies. Motorcycle movies. Psychedelic hippy movies. Dinosaur movies. Germ movies. Punksploitation flicks. Animal travelers movies. Tribes-of-women movies.

Talk about how you got involved in the Los Angeles punk scene of the '70s.
It ran up and bit me on the ass. I was looking for something and there it was, happening all over the place. I had been doing these scratchy comics since the early '70s that finally found a place to be. The humor was a very important part of it.

Most people know your work as the designer of CBS's hit morning kid's show Pee-wee's Playhouse. How'd you hook up with Paul Reubens, who's better known as Pee-wee Herman?
Paul asked me to do a poster for his stage show and I ended up doing the sets and everything else. And then we worked on many other things that did and didn't happen.

Were any of your ideas too far-out for TV?
Most of the things we did on Pee-wee's Playhouse were colorful and patterned and had interesting shapes and materials. That was a lot of it. Cost would be more of a factor in what we could or couldn't do. We weren't trying to get secret messages or anything subversive onto the set. The general feeling was subversive enough on the surface.

Do you stay in touch with Paul? Any plans to collaborate in the future?
Paul and I are often in touch. He and I have had many interesting [experiences] in almost getting shows and movies made that fans of Pee-wee would really enjoy. I hope we get to make some.

I understand you've been working in a new medium, psychedelic light shows. Is this like the hippy stuff? Explain.
It is a bit of hippy light shows mixed with earlier beatnik light shows with new powerful light sources and projectors that weren't available to the hippies or beats.

I am working with Joshua White, who did the light show at the Fillmore East, and he is a visionary and genius in this medium of analog or hand-made light shows. So we have the blobby liquid lights and color wheels and reflectors. It's a giant daydream machine experience. We are having a lot of fun and making some cool visions.

And you have a beautiful new book out, Jimbo in Purgatory (Fantagraphics), which is based on Dante's famous poem. It looks like a real labor of love. Is this your first interpretation of the classics?
I did Dante's Inferno a few years ago when I was doing Jimbo comics for Zongo Comics. And there are all kinds of references in my comics to other works.

Have you ever gone the other route and created sexually explicit stuff?
There are many sexual moments that occur in my comics. Not tons. But sex is there. Writing comics about sex and relationships seems to me to be a way for me to get in trouble with everybody I know, so if I'm doing it, it is in secret.

Are you like cartoonist Robert Crumb, a lover of big women, and do you exorcise your perverted demons through your art?
I love Crumb's work. And his confessions, such as they are, make it so guys like me don't need to do more confessional sexual work.

I purge my aggressions, desire, confusion, disappointment, hate, love, and obsessions in my comics and painting to the extent that I can. It's encoded more than Crumb. I love the women that he admires and draws. There are very beautiful thin women too. Not too thin, though.

I'm a family guy. However, there are still many kinds of beautiful women in the world. I'm not blind. I'm often trying to figure out how to draw them when I stare. And when I watch them on movies and don't know their names.



All illustrations courtesy of GaryPanter.com.