SERIOCOMIC (37)

By: Brian Berger
September 11, 2019

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels.

JIMBO

Like a southwestern Elvis who tripped in a mushroom patch and got up psychedelicized, Gary Panter’s JIMBO is everywhere. We know this not by leftover plates of polk salad on the TV tray or the tell-tale breath of a fried peanut butter and banana eater but something even more primordial. JIMBO was there before you knew it and along with cockroaches, he’ll be there long after we’re gone.

In high school I had a bus driver with long hair and a beard everyone, of course, called Jesus. This savior was more than just alright, he was a hardcore Frank Zappa and Kinks freak whose cockpit was an extravagant shrine to both, festooned with ticket stubs, photos, newspaper and magazine clippings. A boombox fastened to the dashboard kept him sane and at least some dopey kids distracted. Jesus’ favored Kinks albums of the late 1970s and 1980s made no impression upon me, but the Zappa was unforgettable and this is how I first encountered — however unknowingly — Panter’s brilliance, in the compositions inside the album covers that he’d designed: Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites. “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary” was pretty nuts but what this guy Jimbo was doing, I would later learn, was even nuttier.

Ignorant in so many ways, the only comics-related things I was really into as a youth were Danny the Dinosaur, MAD paperbacks, and Doonesbury and Peanuts collections I got from the library. After I discovered Spy, New Journalism and Penthouse Forum, I didn’t even think about comics until the first Maus book appeared in 1986. This was a crucial event in two distinct ways: first, as a revelatory book enfolding a Holocaust story many couldn’t talk about (my own maternal grandparents met in a Linz, Austria Displaced Persons camp), and second, its well-deserved success allowed Art Spiegelman’s publisher, Pantheon, to put out JIMBO: Adventures in Paradise, two years later, which the masses, including me, could find and be astonished by.

There were many incredible things about this JIMBO. That Panter wasn’t as technically stunning as, say, Robert Williams — recently the subject of mainstream scrutiny via Guns N’ Roses though hepcats loved his Divine Horsemen Snake Handler album cover more — didn’t matter. Panter was obviously a virtuoso of the hand and mind, with a consistently startling gift for hyper-awareness and juxtaposition.

For former school bus yokels like me, there was also a shock of recognition: Jimbo as a punk Huck Finn maybe, but our newfound freckle-faced, hillbilly hero for sure resembled Ivan Drago from Rocky IV while predating the death of Apollo Creed by nearly a decade. Recalling the transitive property from math class, it wasn’t Sylvester Stallone or James Brown that led America to Cold War victory, it was goddamn Jimbo — with Prince (“Ronnie, Talk To Russia,” 1981) and the Minutemen (“If Reagan Played Disco,” 1982) — important intermediaries. Thank them all for their service.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

SERIOCOMIC (37)

Categories

Tags