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by Glenn Bray
photos: Peter Anderson & Glenn Bray
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This article was originally published in Comic Art #3.
Thanks to Todd Hignite and Glenn Bray for their permission
to reprint it here.
If this article seems blatantly biased in favor of its
subject - it's true, because not only have I been a great
admirer of the unique art of SAVAGE PENCIL since the early
1980s, but we've also been close friends since about that
time. Neither Sav (a.k.a. Edwin Pouncey) nor I can exactly
remember how we met, but I already knew his work through
Gary Panter (the L.A. punk artist who did collaborative
projects with him in London and with Bruno Richard in Paris)
when we did.
We do remember that he came knocking at our door for the
first time when he was in Los Angeles to draw record covers
for Long Gone John's Sympathy For The Record Industry label.
This three or four day stay became the first of many meetings,
both in our homes and all over the world. Our tastes are,
of course, not identical, but we both have a penchant for
the original, exotic and esoteric in books, music and art
and constantly keep feeding off each other's new ideas and
finds.
Both Edwin and his wife, Jill Tipping, are always in for
new adventures, so over the years we've met up in Amsterdam,
Vienna
(where we visited the magical surrealist Ernst Fuchs), Paris,
Las Vegas, Mexico City (where we met the son of the late
celebrated film poster artist Ernesto Cabral) and Santiago
to fly to Easter Island with other friends and celebrate
New Year's Eve 2000 with the islanders on top of a hill
facing those haunting giant carved faces from the 12th century.
Q: You are mostly known, art-wise, as
an underground artist. Could you relate your connection
with underground comix?
My first contact with underground comix was while I was
still living in Leeds with my parents and younger brother.
They owned a newsagents, a shop which sold newspapers and
magazines - together with a range of confectionery, cigarettes
and alcohol. Every so often a small string-tied parcel would
be delivered to the shop, which was an order of American
magazines and paperbacks from a UK distribution company
called TP.
The arrival of the TP parcel was a real highlight in my
life and my father knew it. On very rare occasions I would
be allowed to cut the string on this small bale of treasure
and inspect the contents. The bulk of it was men's magazines
with lurid covers showing Nazis torturing women, together
with a batch of Marvel and DC titles, but there was other
stuff too. The TP bundles introduced me to EC comics through
the pulp pages of the Ballantine Mad and Tales From The
Crypt anthologies that they had published in paperback.
What I saw just blew my mind and convinced me that my chosen
career would be to become a cartoonist. As it was pointless
to discuss my career plans with my mystified parents I pleaded
with them to let me buy the Mad and Tales From The Crypt
titles from them so that I could take them to my bedroom
for further study. This involved much hand-wringing and
meditative sulking until my father, still reluctantly, handed
them over, on the condition that I worked down in the cellar
shifting crates and restocking the shop with bottles for
a week. This sounded like a good deal.
After poring for hours over the Mad paperbacks haul I had
become obsessed with certain stories. These included "Plastic
Sam", Harvey Kurtzman's brilliant spoof of Jack Cole's
Plastic Man creation (a character I was woefully ignorant
of at that time) and Bill Elder's "Outer Sanctum!"
which sent me into a paroxysm of creative
insanity.
By utilizing Kurtzman and Elder's warped visions I came
up with a character called Super Blintz (I had subliminally
sucked the word blintz into my subconscious from the pages
of Mad, not even knowing it was some kind of food) which
was a yellow blob of plastic with facial features and a
spiky mustache who (like Plastic Sam) had the ability to
change himself into any shape he desired. He also had a
horde of enemies who for various nefarious reasons wanted
him dead. These included a bristly half-man/half-crab creation,
a fanged snowman, and a muscle bound warthog (swiped from
Gilbert Shelton's Wonder Warthog creation which I had probably
seen in a copy of Help! while sorting through the TP pile)
and an egg-headed mad scientist character called Doctor
Krazy who was Super Blintz's deadliest foe. The idea for
Doctor Krazy had been borrowed from Elder's "Outer
Sanctum!" strip, but also from some insane plastic
model kit I had been building which was of a crazed cartoon
surgeon operating on a terrified patient using a variety
of household tools instead of surgical instruments.
After buying a cheap sketch pad from my parents' shop I
would retire to my bedroom and laboriously draw the latest
adventure of Super Blintz - using an enormous multi-colored
ball point pen which I had received as a gift from one of
my relatives. Completing an issue of Super Blintz would
usually take me a week and only my younger brother seemed
to take any interest in the finished product. I eventually
found a friend of the family who agreed to subsidize my
artistic yearnings by buying the only existing original
copy of Super Blintz I had produced for its cover price
of ten pence (the price of a UK Marvel comic) which would
supply me with sufficient funds to buy another sketch book
and continue cranking out further issues. I have often regretfully
wondered what became of those early comics of mine.
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