A native Central New Yorker who arrived in 1965, and grew up in the awesome 70's. On the days I was bored I watched Sesame Street from '69-72 and my favorites were Oscar, Cookie Monster and Roosevelt Franklin. In '71 it was actually exciting for S.S. to end though 'cuz then the wild original Electric Co. would begin, which was like graduating from the Sesame 'hood. My faves were Mel Mounds, Easy Reader and Millie the Helper 'nachurly. Although it's true, that back then with our limited channel selections prior to cable, on most days I was most likely building stuff out of Legos, one of the best toys ever designed [with 'Giant Tinker Toys' a good 2nd]. The mid 70's brought a small community of Mennonites to our area, living off the land with only windmill-generated electricity. It was a pretty common sight to see their horse-drawn carriages on the country roadsides. The men folk even wore jazzy straw hats and preferred riding bikes, very hep.
      The coolest guy in our family was our Grandpa Fowler. He was a professional carpenter and later a popular local architect who always made neat stuff and toys for us in his free time out of wood in his basement shop. While in retirement he started making painted woodcuts mostly of his favorite birds and birdhouses that he gave away for free, usually distributed into the community thru his wife's bingo attendence. He also quite impressively hand made a violin from a photo in a magazine that he scaled up to size (see left). I gave my friend Ron Rege Jr a couple woodcuts and he mentioned him in his Drawn & Quarterly #4 story, which is fitting cuz Grandpa grew up on a little farm near Quebec, Canada. A couple of the woodcuts he did were cartoons from the New Yorker magazine that he read while going to night school in Manhattan and still remembered 'em 40 years later [more wood crafts here]. Once I showed him a color book of Howard Finster's painted wood pieces because they're somewhat similar, and after reading the book he told me he thought that guy was cuckoo. Pretty funny! I guess he musta' inspired me to want to make art cuz he did have a goofy, but reserved sense of humor. His pious wife wigged me out in October of 1974 when out of nowhere she bought me my first issue of Mad (the Exorcist barf bag issue!), inscribing it to me in sharpie on the front cover. My favorite things to read in the 1970's besides Snoopy & R.Scarry books, were MAD, Ranger Rick, Cricket, Famous Monsters of Filmland and Count Morbidas in Dynamite magazine. Although the first non-newspaper comics I ever saw were lurking in full color within a stack of magazines with centerfolds that were in the back of our Dad's closet. My brother's stumbled upon them while trying to find where our parent's had hid our Christmas presents. So years before I saw MAD magazine, I was eyeballing Kurtzman & Elder's adult comics.
      Preferring comic strips, I wasn't interested much in comic books for many years. But my first exposure to reading comic books was after I began hanging out with a natural born troublemaker from my elementary class, who convinced me to check out his collection. Luckily through it all, I discoved that old newspaper comics could still eclipse the boredom I felt after trying to read several of his favorite super-fighting fantasy publications. The marvel/dc experience was worth it, if only so I could discover the select few that had the most amazingly grotesque heavy black inks I'd ever seen. These issues of course as anyone can guess, featured the work of Jack Kirby. Kirby was an immediately recognizable comic storyteller and his books were heaped in excess profusion at our seedy used magazine peddlers back in those days. It was here and in the cheapo comic bins that I began finding old beat-up copies of the "good Duck artist" Carl Barks, who I had been reading was quite good. This was a big step for me, because I absolutely repel most disney productions, but my eagerness to go beyond the supernatural fantasy stuff I was seeing was an extremely easy decision.
      Reading a Barks interview exposed me to the inimitable Winsor McCay whose work stunned me 3 weeks later when his massive foreign published 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' collection came in from an far-away inter-library loan. Not long after that, I was able to order McCay's 'Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend' from our town's only bookstore and had my mind bent open as to a comic strip's potential for surreal humor. I soon drifted into the underground comics realm after meeting D.Sim on a frigidly cold night at an early 80's Con in Rochester, NY. I was drawn to his table because he had a cool looking stack of original art and early Cerebus for sale. It was a good choice to hang out and talk to him cuz he was friendly and I liked what he was spoofing on superheroes. It's sort of funny I was first exposed to Cerebus at this con, because I distinctly remember going to it searching only for Barks and Gerber's Howard the Duck, as well as vintage Not Brand Echh! ...um, cuz I somehow imagined it was similar to MAD [it's not!]. Then for a short while I began reading Cerebus with #19 and it was a good transition into Crumb's Weirdo mag, that I bought soon afterwards cuz it happened to be on the same very small Underground book rack as Cerebus.
      I primarily like comics by the old comic strip masters who created the expansive & inventive full-page Sunday broadsheets prior to 1936. Especially Thimble Theatre's Popeye who is THE original American Comic super hero debuting in 1929 (compared to super-man in 1938). Except of course, Segar's matchless newspaper strongman was a brilliant and bonafide comic. Because of the impractical reasons of collecting comic books for their monetary value I balk on keeping mine collectibly preserved. My small stack of used & well-read, dog-eared original Barks comic books with their rolled, flaking spines and acidic, yellowing pages are highly enjoyable artifacts. To illustrate my viewpoint, once in the mid 1980's I was digging thru dollar boxes at an Ithaca, NY con when a guy walked up to the dealer's table I was searching at and handed him a box to inquire what he would pay for its contents. He was calmly quoted with indifference, "Twenty bucks" [the typical rip-off!] wisely the man reclaimed his box and paused briefly to coincidentally watch me sifting used Barks comics from the cheapo bins. He then asked me if I was interested in buying any of the books he had while handing me the box. Inside were about 30 primary Carl Barks comic books, consisting mostly of his longer format Four-Color one shots from the 40's & 50's that the seller had kept since his childhood. Stunned, I realized I had the chance to instantly acquire highly sought after Barks collectibles from this completely unaware and atypical comic con attendee at probably a significant non-collector sum. But realistically, there's no way I could've done that, because that's precisely the cliched superhero fantasy fanboy conquest that always made me wince. I found out he was selling them because his wife didn't want him to hold on to them any longer, even though he confessed that reading Barks duck comics was his most cherished childhood memory! So anyway, who could take a guy's comics with that kind of baggage? I dunno, I guess I shoulda at least bought one, but I didn't. For me it was fun just to have the opportunity to leaf through some nice original Barks comics once.
      If all I ever saw was super hero pamphlets, I wouldn't have ever wanted to draw comics. For me, even though seeing Winsor McCay's comics and reading Barks significantly altered my perception of comics, it was discovering Gary Panter & George Herriman that made me want to make my own comics. And realistically, it's a little surreal to decribe in 2008 how extremely difficult it was to hunt down and find any Panter or Herriman back in 1984. I would occasionally find and have to sustain on little scraps of images, a panel in a margin, or a random Panter illo in some article. The power of those images even out of context inspired me. It was probably better at first, cuz I ended up inventing my own Panter & Herriman comics for lack of any real ones. The Underground arena of course also revealed the other great image makers who were in Weirdo & Raw, etc. and soon the influence of their finer offerings was concrete. As my confidence grew, I decided that to focus on my direction, I should adopt a humorous pen name to sign-off the comics I was making. Drawing from all the inspirational faves I had uncovered in the mid-80's, I assembled my favorites into an anagram to be my pseudonym, Panter, Segar, Herriman, Addams and Wolverton [the latter's appreciation was rekindled from memories of the old MAD reprints years earlier]. In the Fall of 1988 I finally started assembling my own comics along with my friends into the self-published comic anthology entitled, ST.iNK [a link] and out into the tiny under the radar 80's counterculture zine network it ran amuck.
     Although I can draw better than I can play music, my record collection has influenced me considerably and probably deserves some recognition here. A short list of my all time favorites are as follows: Hasil Adkins, Paul Pena, Roky Erickson, Peter Laughner, Dennis & Jimmy Flemion, Ramones, Mark Perretta, Marc Bolan, Mark E. Smith, Vivian Stanshall, Billy Childish, John Fahey, Raymond Scott, Sun Ra, Son House, Jeffry Lee Pierce, Ravi Shankar, Scratch Perry the Upsetter, James Brown, Miles Davis, Akira Ifukube [Zatoichi & Godzilla], Devo, Big Boys, Run DMC, Minutemen, Meat Pups, Monks, Melvins, Motorhead, Swell Maps, Sonics, The Stooges, Kraftwerk, Edgar Varese, and the Forbidden Planet & Metal Machine Music LP's. As well as all the fun bands involved around the mid 1990's Cambridge, MA 100% Breakfast & Chimp Rock Scene. Especially a few bands that all lived a stone's throw from me: Trollin' Withdrawal , Fat Day and Gerty Farish. Years later I followed Jeremy Harris, Eloe Omoe, Goat of Arms, Dr Doo, and Dreamhouse.
      Because of my interpretation of Winsor McCay's advice to artists, I started carrying around low budget blue-lined memo books in my back pocket to sketch in whenever I felt like it and to record all the gags I thought of during the day. These lousy memo books turned out to be so perfect, I still use them even today because you can keep a pencil stub in the ring binding. Although don't use the brand pictured here, because they've switched from the old nice & thick chipboard back, to some really flimsy backing that is garbage. Usually I'll carry 'em around in my back pocket and let the pages and covers get all messed-up, but that's OK cuz it's the perfect tool because it opens flat on your drafting table. go to SKETCH BOOKS