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

"That's where I really learned to draw, mainly because I was surrounded by people who were better than I was," White says. "I was used to being the big fish in a small pond, and all of a sudden I was low man on a pole. That's why I say to students all the time: Go somewhere where everybody's better than you. That'll put your ass in gear."

These years were one long struggle, White recalls, with one big exception. A hero of White's was Red Grooms, the Nashville native who had become a celebrated pop artist by fusing the graphic hyperbole and energy of cartooning with a sculptural sense of space and implied movement. Art was supposed to be stuffy and dry; Grooms' work was loopy, uproarious, a carnival midway barely tethered to canvas or held in one place.

Grooms needed workers to help paint a project—a 30-foot sculpture of a covered wagon and a cowboy shooting an Indian, now housed in Denver. White got the gig.

"That was incredible," White says. After years in cartooning, working with Grooms gave White his first real glimpse into the art world. By the same token, he believes Grooms was interested in him because the world of underground comics was so far removed from his own sphere of influence.

"He even did a watercolor painting of me called 'The Cartoonist,' " White says. Does he have it hanging under track lighting above his mantelpiece? "Aww, no, man!" he says, laughing. "Even back then, it was probably $20,000. I do have a ball-point pen drawing he did of me."

After that, White went back to cartooning while doing puppet shows at galleries around New York. He got his foot in the door at the now-defunct East Village Eye and worked his way up to credits in The New York Times and The Village Voice. The best thing to come out of this period was that he met Mimi Pond, a cartoonist who'd already authored a book and would go on to write the first broadcast episode of The Simpsons. The long-married couple actually have a keepsake from the night they met at a New York gallery: It was commemorated in Stan Mack's long-running "Real-Life Funnies" comic in The Village Voice.

"You can tell my life for the past 30 years in a series of comic strips, both my own and the women in my life," White says wryly. "Comics are always there for me in a weird way." But it was not comics but puppetry—and the company of an extraordinary TV man-child—that wrenched White's career into a wholly unexpected orbit.

A flip through the sections of Maybe Now I'll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve devoted to Wayne White's early work teems with varied influences. Duchamp butts up against country-music posters, while Grooms and underground comics and '50s commercial art collide and commingle. It turned out that there was a home for all these styles and more, encompassing nearly the whole of modern art: children's television.

With the help of his friend Alison Mork, then working at Nashville's WDCN-Channel 8, White got an assignment to come to Nashville in the summer of 1985 and design the sets and puppets for a kids' music-education program. Called Mrs. Cabobble's Caboose, it fell under the supervision of a young director named Stephen Kopels, now a San Francisco documentary instructor, who saw White's designs and loved them.

The show reunited White with Mork and Mike Quinn, who played a sidekick named P.T. Pickens. For three months, White built model-train tabletops and beetle-browed dog puppets and indulged every stray creative whim he'd been nursing since his School of Visual Arts days. Mrs. Cabobble's Caboose played on various regional public-television stations for at least 15 years, and it got Quinn his own shorter-lived series for older kids, Music Fun Factory. "We had our own little weird kid show empire at Channel 8," White remembers.

Perhaps more importantly, when White returned to New York, it gave him something to hand to the receptionist at Broadcast Media the following February when he heard the production company was planning a hip new Saturday-morning network series. White even remembers the receptionist's name: Rob Zombie. "First white guy I ever saw with dreadlocks," White says, chuckling.

That series, Pee-wee's Playhouse, would go on to win 22 Emmys (including three for White) in its five-season run. But its influence remains as far-flung as the influences that went into it. Densely art-directed shows for children that also cock an eye toward parents? Creepy post-modern adult takes on kiddie TV, from Wonder Showzen to Robot Chicken? The entire Adult Swim lineup of cartoons for curdled hipsters? All can claim Pee-wee's Playhouse to some degree as an antecedent, even if its creator speaks sincerely of it in far less jaded terms.

"Really, I just wanted the show to be visually beautiful," says Paul Reubens, the creator of Pee-wee Herman and his lovingly twee universe. "I just felt like the show could look like no other show has looked before." Toward that end, Reubens, who has an art-school background himself, used the clout he'd won from his HBO special and the success of Pee-wee's Big Adventure to assemble what White calls "a downtown New York art project disguised as a children's show." He signed on Gary Panter, whose work White had long admired, as a set designer and gave him and White and the show's creative team full rein.