Jimbo in Despair, the drawing used as a color overlay on pages 86–87 of Gary Panter’s Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise.

The first time I drew Jimbo … I knew I’d always be drawing him. I don’t know why.

—Gary Panter

Jimbo was born in 1974, two years before Gary Panter moved from Texas to Los Angeles. He is a combination, Panter says, of his younger brother; his friend Jay Cotton; the comic-book boxing champ Joe Palooka; Dennis the Menace; and Magnus, the titular tunic-clad robot fighter in Russ Manning’s mid-century comic; as well as being influenced by Panter’s Native American heritage (his grandmother was Choctaw). Panter has called Jimbo his alter ego, and the character’s most common epithet is “punk Everyman.”

According to Panter, he didn’t set out to create Jimbo, “he just showed up.” Jimbo made his first public appearance in the punk magazine Slash in 1977 and his cover debut two years later. His pug-nosed mug moved to Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s radical art-comics anthology Raw in 1981; some of Jimbo’s stories there made up the first Raw One-Shot, a spin-off of the periodical, the following year. He joined an ensemble cast in Panter’s Cola Madnes, written in 1983 but not published until 2000, and landed his first full-length book, Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise, in 1988, published by Raw and Pantheon. Jimbo has since starred in four issues of a self-titled comic published by Zongo in the nineties and stood in for Dante in two illuminated-manuscripts-cum-comic-books: Jimbo in Purgatory (2004) and Jimbo’s Inferno (2006). He is, as you read these words, being sent out into fresh adventures by Panter’s fervid imagination and tireless pen. Read More

Cartoon by Homer Davenport from The Country Boy, 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

To be or not to be a country boy? To my ear, this has always been one of the animating questions in country music. In “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” (1974), John Denver, for instance, revels in the persona. From the picture he sketches, it’s not hard to see why. Country boys, Denver says, have all they need: a warm bed, good work, regular meals, fiddle music. The life of a country boy, he sings, “ain’t nothing but a funny, funny riddle,” and who doesn’t like a good laugh?

For Hank Williams Jr., however, this country boy business isn’t something to joke about. In “A Country Boy Can Survive” (1981), he says the rivers are drying up and the stock market is anybody’s guess and the world, as a general rule, is going to hell and if you knew what was good for you, you’d be a country boy, too, because in the end only country boys—the ones “raised on shotguns,” the ones who know “how to skin a buck” and “plow a field all day long”—will make it out alive.

Loretta Lynn could do without Hank Jr.’s heated rhetoric, but as she sings in “You’re Lookin’ at Country” (1971), “this country girl would walk a country mile / to find her a good ole slow-talking country boy.” Then, so as to underline her preference, she repeats, “I said a country boy.” Not just any country boy will do. Drawl aside, Loretta makes plain she wants a workhorse with a worn shovel who, in exchange for a tour around the farm, will “show me a wedding band.”

It’s doubtful Lynn’s narrator would have gone for the type Johnny Cash sings about on his first album, Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar!—not that Cash’s country boy would care. He has “no ills,” “no bills,” “no shoes,” “no blues.” A country boy’s greatest privilege, Cash’s “Country Boy” (1957) suggests, is his ignorance of the finer things. In part, he’s happy with his “shaggy dog,” fried fish, and “morning dew” because he hasn’t been exposed to much besides.

Having little, Cash says, country boys have “a lot to lose.” Cash, who by this stage in his life had traded Arkansas fields for a Memphis recording studio, spends a lot of time wishing he could get back to being a country boy, but his hot-and-blue guitar says otherwise. The truth is you couldn’t go back if you wanted to, but would you go back even if you could? Read More