Gary Panter, the renaissance comix genius, has just issued Fog Window Number Two. This tabloid newsprint psychedelic artifact recalls the drug-swept hippie era in tone and content. Panter says designer Char Esme laid the publication out old-school style using “Xacto and paper and glue or wax—not sure about which.” Ultimately, Fog Window is something more than a replica of a bygone haze—it’s an expression of Panter’s inner freak. He speaks about it below.
Why did you publish a second edition of Fog Window?
One function of the paper is to act as a casual catalog for my hippie crafts and accompanying artists at the Gary Panter HIPPYBILLY HEADSHOP at RozzTox/Feeding Tube Records, 221 Pine St., #141, Florence, MA 01062. The show was closed by COVID right after it opened. The show is still up in hibernation.
What is your aim with this psychedelic paper, and psychedelics in general?
I want to advocate for the things I liked about the hippie movement of the ’60s, which is ongoing. I like: new paths, experiments in living, the analog, psychedelic music, light shows, psychedelic posters, legal pot, face-painting, cooperation, psychedelics with caution and care, and an ecological point of view.
The things that seem to not be helpful from that time: free love, being stoned into inertia, having the kids live in a tent out back, cocaine, speed and heroin, begging for spare change.
Is this tabloid connected to some kind of psychedelic neoclassical revival?
Yes, but psychedelic drugs are not for everyone, and the source and dose and setting still matter very much. But I am mainly interested in ways out of our social and ecological mess.
To suggest that something is happening besides and beyond the plague, young people are very depressed and at risk. There have to be avenues proposed to make life worth living and surviving and for social and world repair.
How can copies be ordered?
Feeding Tube is including them free with orders and will sell them. Dersert Island in Brooklyn will sell them. I am mailing them to a couple of hundred people. Small is good.
Edited by Byron Coley and Gary Panter. Design and art direction Char Esme.