Xtreme Weirdness Bob X takes his art into the new millennium. by DAVID HALL any Memphians might know Bob X from the posters he does for the annual Halloween bash "Hell on Earth." What is less known is that Bob has been working professionally for nearly two decades, that his comic strips and T-shirts are sought all over the U.S. and Europe, and that his work has appeared on Swatch watches and skateboards. Recently, Bob was asked by a publisher in Paris to draw a comic strip for Comix 2000, an encyclopedia of significant comic artists' works. Bob's contribution is "Pod 2000," the culmination of his various styles and a reflection of his life-long fascination with trash culture. Among Bob's earliest influences were MAD magazine and Marvel Comics. While he was still in elementary school, Bob got into trouble with the nuns for having "ugly" stickers by Basil Wolverton and Wally Wood on his notebook. He grew up watching monster movies on Fantastic Features (with its host Sivad), reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and putting together more than a few Aurora monster model kits. Bob speaks fondly of bubblegum card art, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's (of Rat Fink fame) monster T-shirts in the '60s, as well as Robert Crumb's Zap Comix. He first saw the art of Gary Panter (Jimbo), a proponent of the "scratchy" drawing style, within the pages of Art Spiegelman's oversized comic Raw. This exposure to "low-brow" art and "throw-away culture" had major appeal for the young artist. The first publication that featured Bob's work was a little fanzine called The Memphis Comics Newsletter and Review in 1976-77, which also had artwork by Chet Darmstaedter. The moniker "Bob X" was first used in 1982, when the artist created a punk zine called Malice. A year later, Bob and Darmstaedter collaborated on a zine called NON which, due to the depiction of bare breasts, the artists found difficult to get printed. Bob recalls that one print-shop owner, pointing to his offset press, said that he printed church bulletins for Adrian Rogers and to print a publication like NON on the same press "would be like slapping Jesus square in the face." Bob and Darmstaedter continued to collaborate as XEX Graphix, not just to distribute their own work but also to feature the work of artists they had been in contact with as a result of the underground comics/mail-art boom of the '80s. The phenomenon of self-published comics was spurred by the combination of mainstream publishers' reluctance to take on new artists and the arrival on the scene of low-cost, high-quality Xerox. This subculture of disaffected artists used the mailbox as their primary source of distribution, and many went on to find mainstream appeal (including Panter and Matt Groening). During the '80s, Bob contributed to many publications, including Weirdo, Blurt!, Your Flesh, Forced Exposure, Real Fun, Tales of the Sinister Harvey, and too many others to list. The Blotter featured his "Von Vox" strip, which Bob says had so much sex and bloody violence it was rejected by Weirdo with a chiding from its editors that "we don't need no Gary Panter imitators." He's even done work for alternative comic moguls Fantagraphics (a Real Girl cover) and Last Gasp, though Bob complains that it takes six months to a year to get paid. Not all of the big-name publishers are so dilatory, however. Commenting affectionately on the publisher of Screw, Bob says, "God bless Al Goldstein. Sure, he runs a porno rag, but he keeps a lot of artists in New York and elsewhere working. And it only takes a week or two to get your check." Bob's art has been featured in Screw numerous times, including a cover, where bare breasts are obligatory, in keeping with the magazine's standard of raunchiness. (Bob didn't let Al down.) As the '80s came to a close, the once vital comic/mail-art scene was losing momentum fast, a result of the Internet's and e-mail's primacy over snail-mail. Bob and Darmstaedter disbanded XEX and went their separate ways. Bob has channeled his energy into painting, beginning in the '90s, first exploring "tribal mask" imagery, characterized by Tiki-like heads rendered boldly and colorfully. He then expanded his repertoire to include, among other things, shrunken heads, monsters with blood-shot eyes and bleeding gums, and cubist heads. Bob has also refused to become sclerosed by the graphic style of his early paintings, despite their popularity with buyers (most of his current paintings are spoken for before they are completed). The artist's most recent works are among the most painterly he has ever done. Since beginning to paint, Bob has since contributed to very few comics, and the only black-and-white work he does on any regular basis is the "Hell on Earth" posters. Bob's connection to the Memphis music scene is not limited to the dozen or so "Hell on Earth" posters and T-shirts. He did the posters for Counterfest, T-shirts for the band DDT, as well as an album cover for Swamp Surfing in Memphis, a compilation that featured the Odd Jobs, Hell Cats, Panther Burns, "and some other shitty bands," says Bob. He credits Tav Falco with teaching him the art of silk-screening and estimates he's done at least 50 T-shirt designs over the years. Bob X's new project takes him back to his roots, in more ways than one. L'Association, a French alternative comics publisher, has solicited the artist to be part of a compendium of influential underground comic artists from around the globe. The dictionary-sized Comix 2000 will juxtapose famous artists like Art Spiegelman with younger, relatively lesser-known artists of this genre. The book will be published this fall and an exhibition of all 2,000 pages is scheduled for next January at the CNBC (French National Center of Comics Art). Bob's contribution is the 15-page black-and-white strip featuring "Pod," a character who debuted in Malice in 1982. Pod is based on a drawing of a Fred Flintstone/caveman figure Bob did when he was in third grade, and it allows him to utilize all of his various techniques, from the very graphic and hard-edged to a Panter-inspired scratchiness. The character has since appeared in many of the artist's strips, including those for Weirdo and EC Comics' Horror From the Crypt of Fear. Pod's various incarnations have suffered from being burned, shot, exposed to radioactive waste, decapitated, and he even gets killed in some strips, only to be brought back again and again (anticipating Kenny of South Park). In the latest incarnation, the principal malady is a Y2K-induced apocalypse, culminating in the explosion of the Earth. Bob sees Comix 2000 as his way -- just like the always-resurrected Pod -- to go on and on. "It kind of immortalizes you to have your art out there."