NEW YORK -- Ted Turner's Cartoon Network will launch a new venue for experimental interactive animation on the Web in December. And it's doing it in style, featuring the manic, edgy art of punk underground comics pioneer Gary Panter.
Panter's first-ever animated cartoon, "The Pink Donkey and the Fly," will debut in four weekly online installments, inaugurating the Cartoon Network's new Web Premiere Toons series. The network is undertaking the online series as "a laboratory of groundbreaking animation," says Sam Register, creative vice president.
To do Panter's tweaky vision justice on the Web, the network has engaged hot Silicon Alley design house Funny Garbage, which has its fingers in a lot of pies these days -- from Morcheeba's latest trip-hop video, to a recent streamlining of the AltaVista search page, to David Byrne's engagingly designed ethno-pop showcase, Luaka Bop.
There's poetic justice in the young artists on his team working on the Panter project, says Funny Garbage president Peter Girardi: "Everyone here was hugely influenced by Panter's work."
They're not alone. Panter is arguably "the most influential cartoonist of his generation," observes Village Voice critic Richard Gehr. (Panter was traveling in Japan and couldn't be reached for comment on this story.)
In the late '70s, when clubs like New York's CBGB's and San Francisco's Mabuhay Gardens were dog collar-deep in spiked hair and snarling feedback, the inhabitants of Panter's Jimbo series were the perfect embodiments of the aggro-fueled vitality of their times. His logo for the punk band the Screamers proliferated on walls and sidewalks everywhere, and Panter joined the stable of genre-defining artists in Art Spiegelman's Raw series.
Panter went on to design the sweetly animistic, funhouse-mirror sets of Pee Wee's Playhouse, and his art -- inspired, in part, by a hellacious acid freakout in the early '70s -- currently graces the pages of The New Yorker and a new tribute album by guitarist Henry Kaiser, Yo Miles!
Spiegelman praises Panter as a "drawing master ... the most like Picasso" of his peers.
So-called high and low art are "one easy continuum" for Panter, Spiegelman explains: "It's not like he's dabbling in the low arts in order to shock, or borrowing from the high arts in order to gain a pedigree for what he's doing. He's just living somewhere in the hyphen between high and low, and it feels very authentic to me."
Though the iconic flotsam and jetsam of Panter's influence bobs up everywhere in the bitstreams, the Picasso of punk himself is not a netsurfer, admits Girardi.
"Panter's one step up from candles," he quips. (Calling Panter "your classic guy from Texas," the Voice's Gehr cracks, "Gary watches King of the Hill and thinks it's a documentary.")
To make Panter's images cutting-edge interactive, Funny Garbage animators are employing Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Director to allow viewers to not only pick paths through a pre-set narrative, but to move characters around in the scenes and influence the action.
"The Pink Donkey and the Fly" -- which the Cartoon Network's Register describes as "sort of a love story," with two villains, Maw and the Coot -- will also be spiked with hidden content, "easter eggs," to reward repeated close viewing. Other geeky frissons include characters reacting to the downloading of certain elements, so there's never a dull moment.
"If you want to just click 'play,' sit back, and watch," says Register, "turn off your computer and watch TV. This is about interactivity."
It's also about the network's canny investment in the future of animation. Though Funny Garbage has a 12-person team working on the Panter series, production costs will still come in at less than the $250,000 required to mount one episode of a cartoon for broadcast on TV.
To maintain consistency, characters used in the Web Premiere Toons series will be made to move like those in traditional cel-based cartoons, so Panter's sloe-eyed, twinkle-toed donkey will reside comfortably next to Cartoon Network classics like Fred Flintstone and Huckleberry Hound.
"We may get our next cartoon hit on the Web," Register enthuses.
