The lecture is free and open to the public and is organized in conjunction with the St. Louis Comic Art Show, a one-day event held downtown at the City Museum, 701 North 15th St.

The St. Louis Comic Art Show is organized by 2002 alumnus M. Todd Hignite, founder of the acclaimed quarterly magazine Comic Art, Starclipper Comics in University City and the mini-comics Web site "USS Catastrophe" (usscatastrophe.com).

The event will spotlight close to 50 small-press comic publishers and creators, including Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics Books and 1999 art school alumnus Dan Zettwoch, creator of Red Bird Comics.

Also to be featured are St. Louis' own Kevin Huizenga and Ted May, Minicomic Artists of the Year in 2001 and 2002, respectively; and Matt Kindt, creator of "Pistolwhip," one of Time magazine's Ten Best Comics of 2001.

Burns and Panter have both exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. Burns first gained prominence in the early 1980s for his work in Raw, the experimental anthology edited by Art Spiegelman. He is the creator of "El Borbah," "Big Baby" and the ongoing series "Black Hole," a 1950s-inflected gothic meditation on the darker undercurrents of teen angst.

Panter, who has also been featured in Raw, is the creator of Jimbo Comics, among others. In the 1970s, he was a seminal artist for the Los Angeles-based punk magazine Slash, earning the nickname "king of the preposterous."

He has designed album covers for Frank Zappa and The Residents as well as sets for the television show Pee Wee's Playhouse, for which he received an Emmy Award. His most recent comic project is a richly layered, pop-culture strewn interpretation of Dante's The Inferno.

The lecture is sponsored by the St. Louis Comic Art Show and the Gallery of Art, the Department of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences and the School of Art's Visual Com-munications and Illustration departments.

For more information, call 935-4523 or visit starclipper.org.