Cola Madnes

"It’s about an imaginary urban wasteland filled with strange creatures. It’s less like a naturalistic novel or a linear narrative than a strange chain reaction, like watching a circus act or scientific demonstration with text. He invents a kind of colloquial American speech that’s very condensed and turns the syntax of normal speech on its head. Like Jerry Moriarty, Gary Panter is a trained painter. But everybody grows up immersed in popular culture. Some people leave the fine arts completely, like me. I said I never want to show in a gallery, it’s not my world, I want to be in reproduction and mass media. But some people, like Gary, kept his painting activity going. He still does cover design for albums and theatrical stuff, like the sets for [the US children’s TV programme] Pee-wee’s Playhouse . People who work in picture stories tend to be multi-media. Every mainstream publisher publishes comics now, so either comics have been co-opted or mainstream publishing has been subverted. We were once considered subversive. Mainstream publishing thought comics were junk. It used to be that the worst thing you could say about figures in a novel is that they were like comic strip characters. That was the ultimate dismissal of the author. Now we’ve come to a point where a review in The New York Times said “this novel could probably be done better as a comic strip”. It’s all been turned around."