After 25 years as artist, cartoonist and Pee-wee’s Playhouse puppet master, Wayne White returns to Middle Tennessee

"There was a younger faculty, and they were all sparked to go," recalls Mike Quinn, one of White's closest friends from his MTSU days. There was also a constant tension, former students remember, between the ambitions of the instructors and their students, many of whom had come from the small rural towns surrounding Murfreesboro.

"They all wanted to do Norman Rockwell, or maybe Vermeer," says Bill Killebrew, an MTSU art alum who now runs a successful Nashville flooring company, "and the faculty just ripped into them." Nobody cut a more imposing figure than White's instructor, David LeDoux, described by Quinn as a "hardcore abstract expressionist" known for berating students with confrontational directness about their values, beliefs and methods of expression.

Quinn believes that LeDoux's toughness was "just him pressuring [students] to be as good as they could be." But in a transcribed conversation with Oldham in the monograph, White expresses ambivalent feelings about his former professor and his methods of humiliation. His big influences at MTSU, White says, were mostly peers such as Quinn, Killebrew (whom he calls "one of Nashville's undiscovered geniuses—truly an amazing painter") and his former girlfriend Carol Tyler, herself now a cartoonist of considerable repute.

It was Quinn, a leprechaun of a man whose soft eyes twinkle with mischief, who sparked White's interest in puppetry "purely through laziness," he says with a laugh. They were hanging out in Quinn's decrepit Dodge Dart when his pal said he'd managed to avoid writing a term paper in his forestry class by putting on a puppet show instead. White was impressed.

A short time later, Quinn helped White dodge an assignment to write a paper on Jean Dubuffet by staging "Punk and Juicy," a "horribly violent" puppet show that ended with geysers of blood. They started to perform puppet shows in backyards and at parties, using whatever devious methods of staging they could rig. Once, for homemade pyrotechnics, they emptied the powder out of firecrackers into a metal can, and at the crucial moment they set it alight. The resulting explosion not only deafened listeners, Quinn says, it set the staging area on fire.

After graduation, White found himself rootless and unemployed. "There were not a lot of openings for abstract expressionists in Nashville in 1980," he deadpans. The only professional artist he knew at the time, he says, was Bill Killebrew, who had found a home for his work at a forward-thinking Hillsboro Village gallery called Martin-Wiley. Run by longtime Nashville art collector Terry Martin and Gene Sizemore, it became a meeting ground for Middle Tennessee artists working outside the realm of strictly representational art.

White's first job out of school was in social services, driving impoverished seniors to activity centers. But in November that year, he got a job better suited to his talents, as a sign painter at the Cumberland Science Museum. It was there he made the acquaintance of Alison Mork, a fellow employee with a similar interest in puppetry and ties to a bohemian singer-songwriter scene centered at the venerable Vanderbilt-area dive Springwater.

As a job, the museum gig allowed White to indulge his art degree and to experiment with its heaps of junk and discarded wood scraps. But he still felt he hadn't found his focus—until the day he stood in The Great Escape looking at a copy of RAW. He recognized one of the cartoonists instantly: Gary Panter, whose work on a Frank Zappa album cover had caught White's eye at a record store near the MTSU campus when he was in school. Something clicked.

"That was the big life-changing moment for me," White says. "That's why I decided to become a cartoonist, like, within a day or two. It was real strong. I was seriously drifting at that time, and that kinda focused me instantly." Shortly thereafter, White loaded his things into his 1973 Ford Maverick, bade farewell to Nashville, and set a course straight for New York's School of Visual Arts, where Art Spiegelman taught classes.

As it turned out, White tracked down Spiegelman, who agreed to a cup of coffee in the school cafeteria. "He read my crappy comics and sort of suggested if I wanted to sit in on his classes without actually signing up, I could," White remembers. It was as if the heavens had parted.

"I thought, 'This is it! My ticket to stardom! I'm in! I am totally in!' " White says, acting out his enthusiasm with mock bravado. What he found instead was a sublet in the West Village and a deadly graveyard-shift gig as a short-order cook, slinging burgers to hopheads at the Empire Diner. Rather than using the skills he sharpened at MTSU, he was falling back on the tool set he'd acquired in high school at the Chattanooga IHOP.

But on Fridays, he would attend classes at the School of Visual Arts, where White says he got an education in more ways than one. Not only were Spiegelman's students younger and more accomplished, they were already getting published in RAW. His classmates included such rising stars in underground comics as Kaz, Mark Newgarden and Drew Friedman. They challenged White to get better or go home.