Jimbo/Zongo Comics
Dave Hall
with Gary Panter, creator of Jimbo, the comic series that was
published under Matt Groening's Zongo Comics label. In the
interview, Gary talks a bit about album cover designs, Zongo Comics,
Frank Zappa, and Matt Groening.
For those unfamiliar with Zongo Comics, it was a comic book company
that Matt Groening started in 1995 as a kind of sister
publication to Bongo Comics, but with an underground slant and
geared towards a mature readership.
Excerpts from interview...
Meet the End of the Century with...
Gary Panter Interview by Sasa Rakezic alias Aleksandar Zograf
URL <http://www.thecomicstore.com/merchant/garypanter.htm>
I first heard of Gary Panter in the early 80's when he drew some
cover designs for Ralph Records, the home of The Residents, who
were (and still are) among my all-time favorite avant-garde weird
pop combos. In The ROZZ-TOX Manifesto, written in 1980, Gary
Panter declared: "There are twenty years left in the twentieth
century. Twenty years to reap the rewards and calamities that
have been put in motion in this period. At this time a current
aesthetic function is emerging: the inevitable culmination of
concepts and experiments pioneered and conducted in this century.
We declare society an amusement park and one to be dead reckoned
with."
At the very end of the century, I had a golden opportunity to
meet Gary Panter in his studio in Brooklyn and to ask him about
what he did in its final decades. Along with me on this
sentimental journey was an international cast of friends - Igor
Prassel, the editor of the Slovenian magazine Stripburger, and
Gunnar Lundkvist, a Swedish cartoonist, and they helped
wholeheartedly with their questions.
{Unlated questions snipped. -dh}
Q: How did you start publishing Jimbo for Zongo Comics?
GP: Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, is one of my
best friends. He was starting a kind of a comic book
company because he liked underground comics, considering
himself an underground cartoonist and still drawing his Life
in Hell strips. And so Groening's company, called Zongo,
put out my comic book series called Jimbo that was
completely, terribly unpopular. Instead of printing like
5,000 each time, they progressively published fewer and
fewer. These comics were so important to me, and it was
great they were putting them out, but there are hardly any
of them in the stores.
The comic is based on this idea I had back in the 70's,
about imagining what if Japan and Texas were the same
place.. I just mixed them all together, and that's where
Jimbo lives. And Zongo was printing something like 1,000
copies of each issue of these comics. They wouldn't even
barely start the press before they would have to turn it off
again, There were only seven issues of Jimbo, and then it
stopped being published by that publisher. It was stopped
because it was just totally unprofitable for them. This
comic book really clouded my relationship with Matt, so I
think that it will be better if I continue that title with
another publisher,
Q: Was Matt Groening disappointed?
GP: I don't know. He published the stuff that nobody else
wanted - like the stuff that I did in the 70's. It was very
important for me to show it. Like, look, here's the stuff
that I did when I was alone in my little room.
Q: Tell me about the world where Jimbo lives. What is it? Is it
in the future?
GP: Well, it is becoming a cliché from the movies, but Jimbo
lives in a post-apocalyptic world. I had different ideas
about it, and one of these was a "reverse universe",
crashing back towards a big bang, like we are expending out
and Jimbo is going back in after a zillion years, and they
are digging out fossils of us. They are just like a
chemical formation. I don't really think about it that
much. Anyway, this is like picking up all the things that
strike me: OK, this is my world, this isn't my world, and I
like this animal, etc,
And it's got messages and explorations, Del Tokyo is another
thing, I draw it monthly for a Japanese reggae magazine
called Rhythm. I think that they can see how influenced I
am by Japan because the Japanese have those
institutionalized lowbrow drawings in the back of their
magazines, and some of their best cartoonists draw in this
crappy style.
Q: How did you get involved with album cover design?
GP: When I moved to LA in '76, I was desperate to get work, and
I started to do little spot illustrations for some record
companies and magazines, or just showing my weird paintings.
I didn't know it, but Frank Zappa was on tour, and Warner
Brothers decided to get him off the label. The way they
were doing it was issuing a breaking-up four- album set
called "Ladder." So they issued (while he was on tour)
albums in very rapid succession. I just got a call from an
art director that I knew, asking me if I wanted to do a
Zappa cover, and I said, "YES!" But I didn't hear anything
from Frank Zappa; I never met him. Then the art director
called me a month later, and asked if I wanted to do another
Zappa cover, and I did it, and I still didn't meet Zappa. I
was thinking, "What is going on? Is he control freak, where
is he?" And when they called me for a third one, I said that
I don't know what the deal was, and they explained. So I
did the cover, and I think that he ended up liking them.
OK, years later. Matt Groening became friends with Zappa,
and Zappa told him he liked the covers. I never met Zappa,
which was too bad.
--
"You know you're doing something right when you make pinch-faced
bigots angry."
-- Matt Groening