Cola Madnes

by Gary Panter

This novel tells the story of a mysterious tribal figure named Kokomo, who falls asleep to dream a wild picaresque interlude starring Jimbo and Bob War.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Humor, Fiction, Art

212 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Gary Panter is an American cartoonist, illustrator, painter, designer, and part-time musician, widely regarded as a leading figure in the post-underground, new wave comics movement. His work, described by The Comics Journal as defining him the "Greatest Living Cartoonist," has influenced alternative comics and visual culture for decades. Panter grew up in Texas, studying at East Texas State University under Jack Unruh and Lee Baxter Davis. In the 1970s, he became a key participant in the Los Angeles punk scene, producing gritty, expressive art for the fanzine Slash and numerous record covers. This period saw the creation of Jimbo, Panter’s punk everyman, who combines influences from Jack Kirby, Picasso, and underground comics, appearing in Raw, Slash, and Panter’s own graphic novels, including Jimbo in Purgatory and Jimbo’s Inferno. These works blend classical literature, particularly Dante’s Divine Comedy, with punk sensibilities, and Jimbo’s Inferno won an American Book Award. Panter’s influence extended to television as the set designer for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, where his densely layered, chaotic designs earned him two Daytime Emmy Awards. He also created online comics like Pink Donkey and published retrospectives such as the two-volume Gary Panter. He contributed album cover art for Frank Zappa and Yo La Tengo, bridging the worlds of comics, music, and fine art. His style is expressionistic and fast, balancing painting, commercial art, illustration, cartoons, and alternative comix. Exhibitions of his work include the Phoenix Art Museum, Dunn and Brown Contemporary Gallery, and the "Masters of American Comics" show at New York’s Jewish Museum. In 2012, Panter received the Klein Award from the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, recognizing his enduring contributions to the field.

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow!

I'm apparently the only one who thinks this book pretty well sucks.

The story itself is just all right. It reads like a half remembered dream and involves a quest for fast food that ends in total destruction and a severed head floating in a tank of human excrement. Okay...maybe more like a bad acid trip than a dream...

The artwork is awful. To call it childish is an insult to children everywhere. Most of the panels look like crude sketches that were meant to be fleshed out by the artist at a later date, but ended up, unfinished, in this book, instead. I've Googled Gary Panter's art and it is edgy, vibrant, exciting, and bears little resemblance to the scrawls in this book.

Panter was a designer for Pee Wee's Playhouse, a show I still adore. Unfortunately, most of the characters in Cola Madnes resemble Randy -



my least favorite Playhouse denizen.


This was a remainder catalog find that I wish had stayed hidden.

[Brenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cola Madnes (sic) appears to be a thinly-veiled commentary on the excessive culture of modern society, projected against a backdrop of convention and tradition. Being an early work of Gary Panter, however, makes the thematic content of the work virtually incomprehensible.

Be that as it may, Cola Madnes remains Panter's arguably most accessible work. Consisting of a relatively cohesive storyline in the context of a hallucinogenic dream had by one tribal man in the throes of ritualistic fervor, this surreal venture into a modern-day excremental Abbadon is repugnant. Yet, the reader finds one's self amongst the morally diseased - or at the very least, a shade thereof.

Sexual tensions, frustrations, and mutilations are combined with monomaniacal obsessions, fecal tortures, and murderous rages. The stage is set with these various conflicts long before the "dream" sequence begins.

The story itself was "discovered" after having been forgotten - in notebook form - in artist Panter's portfolio. Some twenty years after its initial inception, the bastard book came into being in a more formal edition. Part manga, part Tijuana Bible (with Panter's comic everyman Jimbo being the source of the quasi-spoof), this book exists solely for the Doom Generation-cum-Gregg Araki.

An unpleasant, pestilential, visceral read, Cola Madnes reflects the most inhumane - and instantly recognizable - aspects of humanity which lie deep within the id of mankind.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 3 out of 5]

A comic volume supposedly missing for twenty years, since the eighties, following Panter's Jimbo and featuring him and Bob War. What is this like? Sketchy, though sort of a sci fi, Krazy Kat action feature, with a sort of punk feel, too, but maybe I get that because some of Jimbo was published in Raw, and LA Punk Slash Magazine. There's an exuberant essay by John Carlin called "Crossing the Line: The Profound and the Profane in Gary Panter's Cola Madnes that is included, but it makes the work out to be more genius than I would have credited to it. A preface by Shizuo Ishii says it is inspired by Godzilla (the Japanese version), Philip K. Dick, Anthony Burgess and Picasso. It has a bit of caffeinated cola madness about it. Why only one "s" in Panter's word "madness"? Hey, if you ask, you are obviously not in this club, dude.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've got boundless affection for Panter, who was to the west coast punk 70s what Crumb was to the hippie-dippy 60s, albeit with a design sensibility that worked much better for cheaply knocked off cartoon junk. Duckman? Rugrats? Rocko's Modern World? It's all Panter. Pee-wee Herman's weirdo act? Far less important than Panter's set designs (Panter, of course, was far more relentlessly commercial/capitalist than Crumb, who was a shrewd businessman in his way even as Panter became, in his prime, a "business, man" - he even laid it all out before executing it, https://www.altx.com/manifestos/rozzt...). That said, what's interesting about Panter's actual work, including an early work like Cola "Madnes," is how id-propelled and unrepeatable it is. You can crib the way he letters or draws lines, but you can't tell a story like this in any other format. Highly recommended.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now here's something I've been looking for and didn't even know it. Gary Panter was not familiar to me (at least by name, didn't know that thanks to him we have the design of Pee Wee's Playhouse) until recently. I like his sensibility - there's violence and rawness but also a sensitivity and some kind of striving and fighting for something better; I like his drawing (at least what I've seen so far) - nervous, jagged, sketchy, but solid and somehow full of volume (like Krazy Kat), and energetic as all hell. I don't even think this is considered some of his better work, but I still see myself flipping through this again and again. And even the story is rather sophisticated, referencing cargo cults and our fraught and delicate relationships with family and food and nature and rampant consumerism and tits and shit.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite nearly a masterpiece. Nothing can surpass Panter's Jimbo, but this crazed exorcism of fast-food, cargo-cult, inflatable-doll demons contains some of his most spectacular art and tortured imaginings.

[StrictlySequential · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would be wonderfully funny and interesting if it was done by someone in their teens because the HORRIBLE art would be acceptable and the ultra-juvenile story would be hysterical. The fact that he was in his thirties with extensive formal art training makes it very dumb and unsightly. I'm not saying such an adult can't pull off a story in the vein of a teen with corresponding art but this is far from such an effort.

I absolutely got some laughs and interest in its absurdity because I've retained childhood folly within my psyche and I still enjoys an ample cornucopia of silly boobs, boners, gory mayhem and MUCH more of that kind of thing -liberally distributed throughout- but that in no way made this work as a story for me.

I have the feeling that it was "lost" for 18 years because Panter had a similar opinion of his work and that groupie tool-box sharing fan-boys who study their idols to the extent of knowing this existed found a way to get him to reveal it.

Definitely read the critical essay at the end to see what art style and adult worldly themes he, according to John Carlin*, was ATTEMPTING to convey but it kind of takes away from the amount of childish charm that it has. What Carlin ultimately accomplished was to show how a well thought appraisal of the themes and minutiae seen through the wide scope of Americana can make something that didn't work in presentation seem brilliant.


*- Whoever he is he's a bone-head because he re-caps the story incorrectly (you don't even need to flip back it's so obvious) and spells Salari with a y. To his credit- he does go off on an American culture within storytelling tangent that is well stated and insightful.

[c l o n · Rating 5 out of 5]

open eyes
drink coffee
start here
carry on

[Al McCarty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just don’t get it.

[Edwin Vazquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know that moment when waking or falling asleep where wild, silly thoughts are made? That place where the rules of the world are broken and you are left in your true natural state? Well here it is! In book form and in all its splendor.

A sublime piece of work which makes you wonder...How does he do it?

[Robin Goodfellow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very odd, off-putting, and geniusly Panter. Gross, stupid, poetic, and deep.

You will have a visceral reaction to reading this book. Few artists can achieve such effects.