The Vortex

My parents sent me a Transformers birthday card.  So now you know a little something about me. So I've given the Panter books a look see.  Its good to have touchstones -- art and artists that you know your identifying with, totally consciously.  Nothing is created in a vacuum. Back when I lived in Santa Ana, me and my pal JJ got caught in a Gary Panter / Jonathan Lethem / Philip K. Dick vortex.  Everywhere we went, it seemed everything was pointing towards the work of those three fellows, to the point where we met them (well, Panter and Lethem) during the fabled Masters of American Comics show back in November of '05.  They both are big PKD devotees; Panter interviewed him for Slash magazine back in the day, and Lethem has admitted his influence so much he wrote the introduction to a recent Dick collection.  I was already a Panter and PKD fan, JJ already a Lethem fan -- to find out we were living in the town where Dick lived his last days began to weird us out.  An old Houston artist friend of mine, Mark Flood, told us we were in a vortex, half jokingly, and we knew.  I began to wander about Santa Ana, trying to figure out where Dick used to live.  I tried to make it a point to let everyone in that town know that he lived and died there.  Cal State Fullerton, where I was attending grad school has his original manuscripts archived at their library.  Add to that our friend Bob had a connection to the missing PKD robot head that was making news at the time.  

The new issue of Jonathan Lethem's latest work, the comic book Omega the Unknown, sports a Gary Panter drawn cover.  Now I am in LA, where down by the Nokia Theatre, video billboards begin the visual future for the town envisioned in the Dick-adapted Blade Runner.  It goes on and on.

I seem to be in some Euro-art-comics vortex now.  But that's a whole other post. But it's not hard to see the connections............