{"id":151657,"date":"2021-03-29T14:52:54","date_gmt":"2021-03-29T18:52:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=151657"},"modified":"2021-03-29T14:52:54","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T18:52:54","slug":"gary-panters-punk-everyman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/03\/29\/gary-panters-punk-everyman\/","title":{"rendered":"Gary Panter\u2019s Punk Everyman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jimbo in Despair<\/em>, the drawing used as a color overlay on pages 86\u201387 of Gary Panter\u2019s Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The first time I drew Jimbo \u2026 I knew I\u2019d always be drawing him. I don\u2019t know why.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Gary Panter<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s mid-century comic; as well as being influenced by Panter\u2019s Native American heritage (his grandmother was Choctaw). Panter has called Jimbo his alter ego, and the character\u2019s most common epithet is \u201cpunk Everyman.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Panter, he didn\u2019t set out to create Jimbo, \u201che just showed up.\u201d Jimbo made his first public appearance in the punk magazine Slash <\/em>in 1977 and his cover debut two years later. His pug-nosed mug moved to Fran\u00e7oise Mouly and Art Spiegelman\u2019s radical art-comics anthology Raw<\/em> in 1981; some of Jimbo\u2019s stories there made up the first Raw One-Shot<\/em>, a spin-off of the periodical, the following year. He joined an ensemble cast in Panter\u2019s Cola Madnes<\/em>, written in 1983 but not published until 2000, and landed his first full-length book, Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, 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<\/em> (2004) and Jimbo\u2019s Inferno<\/em> (2006). He is, as you read these words, being sent out into fresh adventures by Panter\u2019s fervid imagination and tireless pen. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Slash<\/em>, August 1979, published and edited by Steve Samiof and Melanie Nissen.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gary Brad Panter was born in Durant, Oklahoma, in 1950 (in his birth announcement, the local paper presciently misspelled his middle name as \u201cBard\u201d). His family moved to Brownsville, Texas, in 1954, and then to Sulphur Springs four years later, where Panter would remain until he left for college, twenty miles away in Commerce, in 1969. In Brownsville, the family house sat across the street from a drive-in movie theater, and the glowing screen was visible from the front yard. He saw Fantasia<\/em> there, and The Animal World<\/em>, a 1956 documentary with an extended stop-motion animation sequence of dinosaurs fighting created by Ray Harryhausen and Willis O\u2019Brien. At the theater in town, Panter saw his first monster movie, The Land Unknown<\/em> (on a double bill with The Curse of Frankenstein<\/em>, both 1957), about an expeditionary party that accidentally lands in a prehistoric jungle in Antarctica. He still recalls the primitive special effects: actors in monster suits and monitor lizards standing in for live dinosaurs. Panter\u2019s father, an amateur painter of Western pictures, ran two dime stores, wonderlands of dinosaur figurines, toys, and comic books like Donald Duck<\/em>, Mighty Mouse<\/em>, and Turok, Son of Stone<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Set against the capacious Texas landscape, these first encounters with visual culture\u2014both the shabby otherworldliness on the screen and the proliferating pop detritus of the dime store\u2014form the bedrock of Panter\u2019s art. It is overlaid with the Church of Christ teachings of his youth and his later break with religion, and his first encounter, almost mystical in Panter\u2019s telling, with hippie culture:<\/p>\n

It was the summer of 1968. We decided to drive our old station wagon from Sulphur Springs to Mount Shasta, California, to visit our cousins \u2026 [My cousin] Hotrod was in high school and he drove me around town \u2026 He drove us by where the hippies lived in town in a ranch-style home with the yard grown up three feet high and a car up on blocks in the side yard.<\/p>\n

The [head] shop was dark and smelled like BO, incense, patchouli. Cloth was draped over tables, and the counters were draped or had stickers on the wood. There were flyers in the window. The place was small. There wasn\u2019t a lot of merchandise. No bongs or manufactured stuff. A girl dressed like a hippie was silkscreening a version of the famous Mindbenders poster [by Wes Wilson]. And there were flutes, leatherwork, stone pipes, a hookah, ceramics, beadwork, beads in vials for sale. And a little loom. God\u2019s eyes of yarn. Maybe four people in there being hippies. Psychedelic posters, essences, underground newspapers \u2026 It was what a hippie shack should be like. It was alien like Satyricon<\/em> is alien.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At art school at East Texas State University, Panter was introduced by his professor Bruce Tibbetts to the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Burroughs, to John Cage\u2019s Silence<\/em> and Stravinsky\u2019s notes on composition, and to the music of Frank Zappa. Robert Smithson visited the school and screened his film Spiral Jetty<\/em> (1970), a portrait of the earthwork that the artist imagined transcending time and linking the earthly and celestial spheres. Panter consumed art and culture widely and freely, and the collision of disparate elements produced Dal Tokyo around 1972, a futuristic Martian city in which many of Panter\u2019s comics are set. The name blends Dallas<\/em> and Tokyo<\/em>, reflecting not only the here and the elsewhere for an East Texas art-school kid but also the origin of the invented land itself: a city terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers and populated by a multitude of aliens. The influences on the creation of Dal Tokyo are legion: J.\u2009G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Burroughs, and Anthony Burgess; Charles Fort, Immanuel Velikovsky, and books on UFOs; Alice in Wonderland<\/em> and Oz; Donald Barthelme and Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>; cowboy, monster, and Hercules movies; slot racing and Marx-brand play sets (Civil War, spacemen, Romans); modern art, hippie art, and the Sears Christmas catalog. As a \u201ccultural and temporal collision,\u201d according to Panter, it seems to take as a directive Smithson\u2019s desire for \u201ca map that would show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world I lived in.\u201d It is a world of near-limitless storytelling possibilities, a cultural fusion so complete that it engenders an utterly new world altogether, capacious and flexible enough to meet the unique demands of each Panter comic.<\/p>\n

Punk hadn\u2019t infiltrated Texas, as far as Panter knew, but his artistic efforts\u2014in particular the Devo-esque art group Apeweek that sought to invade and pervert the media\u2014predicted the improvisatory and rebellious spirit he\u2019d find in the punk atmosphere in LA. Apeweek, comprising Panter and art-school friends (and later Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/em> collaborators) Jay Cotton and Ric Heitzman, made puppet shows, videos for Dallas public television, art installations, and performances in 1974 and 1975. Its imperative was \u201cart that you could make out of a Gibson\u2019s Discount store and use it all wrong,\u201d Panter says. The group\u2019s provocations paralleled those of the contemporaneous Ann Arbor art noise collective Destroy All Monsters, and helped spawn the Church of the SubGenius in North Texas, a legendary huckster cult formed in 1978 that used the language of evangelism\u2014religious and commercial\u2014to wage an outrageous and absurd fight against the \u201cconspiracy of normalcy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Panter carried this disruptive, vernacular approach with him to LA in 1976, where he discovered a forward-looking, if not strictly punk, atmosphere. Though he found that \u201cnobody was taking Dubuffet, Jack Kirby, and David Hockney and putting them together with Peter Saul, the Hairy Who, and Fahlstrom,\u201d as he was, he did locate disparate models and like minds for his burgeoning brand of formal hybridization and cultural synthesis. He looked up the illustrators Cal Schenkel and Jan Van Hamersveld and visited Kirby at his house in Thousand Oaks. He became friends with Ed and Paul Ruscha after he knocked on the door of Ed\u2019s studio on Western Avenue. He met Mike Kelley through Claude Bessy (a.k.a. Kickboy Face), an editor of Slash<\/em>. Leonard Koren liked his portfolio and let him advise on an issue of Wet<\/em>, the graphically adventurous magazine of \u201cgourmet bathing\u201d that launched in 1976. Koren later introduced him to a young cartoonist named Matt Groening, whose strip Life in Hell<\/em> made its debut in Wet<\/em> in 1978.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Panter wearing an Apeweek mask in Los Angeles, 1978. The masks were \u201cabout Mexican wrestling, A Clockwork Orange<\/em>, primitivism.\u201d Photo: Melanie Nissen.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was in this period that Panter formulated the concept of Rozz-Tox. The Rozz-Tox Manifesto ran in the L.A. Reader<\/em> in 1979 as a series of personal ads, but the idea for it had begun in 1976 and was an extension of drawings he had made in college. The name drew from his teacher Lee Baxter Davis\u2019s \u201cPox\u201d series of etchings and from the term rozzes<\/em>, meaning \u201cpolice,\u201d in Burgess\u2019s A Clockwork Orange<\/em>. The x<\/em>\u2019s and z<\/em>\u2019s implied something futuristic to Panter, and his original notion was to think about what comes after rock \u2019n\u2019 roll. \u201cEverything dies as a fad and cultural trend,\u201d he says, \u201cso I imagined some kind of noisy technological modern music.\u201d Inspired by Panter\u2019s reading of various manifestos and accounts of modern art, Rozz-Tox evolved into a phony art movement that not only described the end of Modernism but anticipated the kind of postmodern art that would take hold in the eighties: art that took as its subject, and sometimes its medium, advertising and consumer culture, imitating it in order to critique it\u2014the photographic appropriations of the Pictures Generation, for instance, and Jean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s palimpsestic paintings. \u201cOur own creations have shamed us,\u201d Panter writes in the manifesto. \u201cTeaching us that the hand and opinion of the individual are not as legitimate as that of opinion transmuted and inflated by broadcast \u2026 Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim. Inspiration has always been born of recombination.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rozz-Tox Manifesto also encouraged finding alternative ways to make and situate art in the capitalist world\u2014advice that has only become more urgent over time. It warns against relying on the \u201caesthetic\u201d media to point you in the direction of what is good and worthy in art and culture; the individual should follow her own instincts, her own tastes. In other words, great art doesn\u2019t exist only in the pages of glossy magazines.<\/p>\n

In punk\u2019s wake came rampant fragmentation and recombination, and Panter\u2019s manifesto, playful and exaggerated, bloomed into this sweeping \u201cpostpunk\u201d era. Simon Reynolds\u2019s description of the period from 1978 to 1984 also encapsulates what Panter was up to then:<\/p>\n

[Those years] saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature. The entire postpunk era looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music \u2026 Lyricists absorbed the radical science fiction of William S. Burroughs, J.\u2009G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick, and techniques of collage and cut-up were transplanted into the music.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When, as Reynolds reports, John Lydon threw off the Johnny Rotten persona and formed Public Image Ltd (whose name was taken, in part, from a Muriel Spark novel) in 1978, he thought of the group not only as a band but as a \u201ccommunications company,\u201d one that would intervene in other areas of media in order to demystify the music business and reimagine what it could produce. At the same moment, in California, the Rozz-Tox Manifesto declared, \u201cIf you want better media, go make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Panter moved to New York in 1986. Before leaving LA, he designed the sets and puppets for Paul Reubens\u2019s Pee-wee Herman stage show. In New York, Rubens asked him to do the same for his new television show, to be broadcast on CBS. Panter\u2019s designs for Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/em> infused the atomic aesthetic of fifties LA coffee shops with Dubuffet\u2019s aesthetic agnosticism and the vivid, mass media\u2013inspired British Pop art that Panter admires, in particular Eduardo Paolozzi. \u201cWe put art history all over the show,\u201d he said. Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise<\/em> contains the same kind of recombination: a collage of styles that represents Panter\u2019s thoroughgoing absorption of visual culture. It looks and reads as though it were composed by an otherworldly visitor with the whole of human civilization (at least up to the late eighties) at her disposal.<\/p>\n

Adventures in Paradise<\/em> gathered comics from Slash<\/em> and Raw<\/em>, together with new material and a handful of Panter\u2019s \u201cWilliam and Percy\u201d strips that ran in the L.A. Reader<\/em> in the early eighties. The work was produced over a decade, from 1978 to 1988 (the majority dates from the late seventies and early eighties, and the opening and closing sections were the last to be made), but the sequences aren\u2019t arranged chronologically. Instead, Panter organized them to create what he has described as a \u201crambling coherence.\u201d The book\u2019s mode is disjunction and unmaking\u2014formally, in the salmagundi of page layouts and drawing styles (shifting effortlessly between Cubism, Neo-expressionism, Kirby, sixties Chicago figuration, Ukiyo-e woodcuts, and George Harriman, among others); narratively, as the story leaps, lurches (including a very funny jump cut), and finally explodes; and tonally, from punkish mischief to romance, cartoonish crime to outright atrocity.<\/p>\n

It takes place in the near future, in Dal Tokyo, the Martian city run by corporations, and which illustrates Panter\u2019s play-set approach: all the toys and cartoon characters, punks, weirdos, and aliens set in motion in one huge sandbox. He titled the book Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, though he hadn\u2019t yet read Dante and the book has nothing to do with the Paradiso<\/em>. (Still, Dante\u2019s celestial theology is arguably no less a radical science-fiction vision of the vast smallness of the universe than Panter\u2019s sociocultural stew bubbling on Mars.) Of his very early career, Panter said, \u201cin some ways you accept your vision or you don\u2019t, and I keep having more and more visions and just moving to the next one to see how far I could go.\u201d It\u2019s an apt description of Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, too.<\/p>\n

The book begins with a soliloquy by Jimbo as he makes his way through the city to a neighborhood Feedomat, a fast-food joint in which orders are transmitted to robots by thought (it\u2019s peak surveillance capitalism):<\/p>\n

Have you ever had a dream where you knew you were dreaming, but it was so real that you didn\u2019t trust your judgement? And you thought \u201cWell, maybe it did get this bad, but it got bad so fast and so different!\u201d So then you thought \u201cNah! It\u2019s just a dream. Things aren\u2019t this bad yet!\u201d When suddenly, it all seemed feasible again \u2026 And so boring and normal\u2014convincing\u2014like any other day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The slippage between dream, nightmare, and reality is a hallmark of Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, which rambles, and sometimes veers, among different states of reality, some to be believed and others not. It is antic and outrageous, a convocation of childhood wonders that might convince us that \u201cdreams are toys,\u201d as Antigonus reasons in The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>. Jimbo, despite his punk lineage, is no nihilist, no anarchist. He has more in common with a small-town Texas boy gazing rapt at the glowing screen of a drive-in; he is an empathetic and enthusiastic observer, like his creator. \u201cI never jumped in the mosh pit,\u201d Panter says. \u201cI stood in the back, or on the sides, or even backstage, observing.\u201d When Jimbo goes to a show at the beginning of the book, he complains about the fashion\u2014the rubber pants are too tight and he can\u2019t afford the fake scars that everyone wears. And Panter draws him just at the edge of the crowded pit, remarking on, but not joining, the fray. By book\u2019s end, however, the dream does offend. Panter depicts a reality so nightmarish it couldn\u2019t possibly be true, but is.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An ad in the Village Voice<\/em>, 1988. Only one person showed up for the signing.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jimbo\u2019s adventure takes him from his mansion high on a green hill, \u201cgigantic but condemned\u201d (a lapsed Eden, not so far from Paradiso<\/em> after all), to a crowded, kaleidoscopic music show\u2013turned\u2013riot that unravels in hallucinogenic wonder when he drops acid. Rifts tear at the panels and page gutters, nebulous forms that reproduce the way shapes dissolve into one another during an acid trip, but portals, too, opening to parallel planes of existence. He meets Smoggo, the smog monster, and falls in love with his unflappable sister, Judy, the unsung hero of the book who, when she is kidnapped by cockroaches, declares, \u201cJimbo, it won\u2019t break my heart if I have to save myself!\u201d (She does, too.) Meanwhile, King Ducko and his cockroach lackeys want the plans to the Radioactive Planetoid Burger Bar Corp.\u2014or else. Laced within this main story are strange interludes, starring Rat Boy, Nancy and Sluggo, and Jimbo Erectus, as well as a (self-)critical fable about the United States\u2019 exploitation and debasement of Native Americans.<\/p>\n

The book coheres because it doesn\u2019t try to. It runs on artistic adrenaline, unalloyed energy, and the joy of drawing. Its ruptures and tangents embody the social upheaval of the late seventies and eighties, and Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, perhaps more than any other comic by Panter (or by anyone, for that matter), inextricably links avant-garde and popular culture into a single work full of feeling and ideas. It runs hot like a punk song and yet its hero is a sensitive hippie. \u201cIt was rude and so weird and not readable\u2014all of the things that made comics narratively legible are part of the sabotage that is Jimbo<\/em>,\u201d Spiegelman recalls of the comic\u2019s reception among general readers. For all the book\u2019s fragmentation, Jimbo is fully alive as a character. As Smoggo tells him, \u201cYou\u2019re litrature, buddy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2014, writing about his memory of visiting the hippie shack in California, Panter recalled the aura of activity in the place. This \u201cevidence of doing,\u201d as he calls it, links the process of making to the body itself. In thinking about that experience, he observes that H.\u2009C. Westermann\u2019s work \u201cradiates powerful vibes of having been intensely touched, refined.\u201d He comments, too, on \u201cthe ears of Peter Saul\u2019s mind, the hand craft of Nutt, and Wirsum.\u201d Markmaking (or objectmaking) is, for Panter, a process that conjoins knowledge or emotion and physicality. \u201cDrawing is a way of controlling your world if you can control your hand,\u201d he has said. His love for movies in which special effects are visibly human-made finds expression in his unpolished, ratty line\u2014his distinctive drawing style that evidences its own handmade-ness.<\/p>\n

In Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, he dedicates a story from 1979 to \u201cthe Guardians of the Ratty Line, who are Bringing it to its proper place in society\u201d\u2014among them, Matt Groening, Edwin Pouncey (a.k.a. Savage Pencil), Cal Schenkel, and Jeffrey Vallance. The camaraderie reminds me of Bernard Sumner\u2019s first impression of the Sex Pistols: \u201cI saw the Sex Pistols. They were terrible. I thought they were great. I wanted to get up and be terrible too.\u201d Looking back on Raw<\/em>\u2019s publication of Panter\u2019s Jimbo comics, Spiegelman has said: \u201cThere\u2019s a separate moment in comics\u2019 trajectory that indicates some new sensibility coming in. Gary was the clearest version of what that might be, as separate from what I\u2019d known up to that point in underground comix.\u201d Mouly saw in the work a \u201csense of what could be happening now and could be the future of comics.\u201d Panter, always looking to see what comes next, had created the next thing.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

At the end of the Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, Jimbo must disarm an atomic bomb; he fails. The story overloads, narratively and visually, in one of the most masterfully drawn sequences of the medium. Panter composes each page in a different style, forms dematerializing and recombining in a new state, atoms rearranging. He studied books on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and modeled the comic\u2019s backgrounds on what he read. He has described the ending as a \u201chistrionic but heartfelt\u201d meditation on the bombings of Japan as well as an attempt to address that \u201cunsettled debt.\u201d The nuclear threat was present as he drew those pages, too: in 1979, only a few years before he composed the atomic sequences, the Three Mile Island facility, in Pennsylvania, melted down. In a strip earlier in the book, drawn contemporaneously with the meltdown, Panter adds a winking aside to the reader: \u201cNo patriotic American would be mad if you, our society\u2019s vandals, threw a brick through your nearest corporation that invests heavily in nuclear power.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cubist shards, moody ink washes, and spectacular arrays of breathless line work describe a puncture in time, a fragmented moment in which the present seems to leap forward in an instant. This existential doom is somehow elegant, as when Smithson, flying above his Spiral Jetty<\/em> suspended in the Great Salt Lake, observes,<\/p>\n

The flaming reflection suggested the ion source of a cyclotron that extended into a spiral of collapsed matter. All sense of energy acceleration expired into a rippling stillness of reflected heat. A withering light swallowed the rocky particles of the spiral, as the helicopter gained altitude. All existence seemed tentative and stagnant. The sounds of the helicopter motor became a primal groan echoing into tenuous aerial views. Was I but a shadow in a plastic bubble hovering in a place outside mind and body?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Panter\u2019s pen dips into horror after horror, before alighting on the burned horse. Why a horse? His father, Panter once recalled, was \u201csentimental about horses and dogs and hates Western novels where the horse get killed. If anything bad happens to a horse in the story he\u2019ll throw the book down.\u201d The destruction of a horse was perhaps the best representation of barbarity Panter could think of. That final image, still and terrible: it evokes the obliterating silence that Dick describes in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>, \u201cthe lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Panter met Dick in LA in 1980, they exchanged stories about personal visions and the confusion that surrounded those visions. Panter told Dick about a bad trip he\u2019d had in college, simultaneously foreboding and retrograde:<\/p>\n

The pictures were coming at me ten thousand a second, and they were all relative, personal and manufactured. A lot of them were in the style of my art and most of them were wrong. They also seemed to be predictive, and I felt like a lot of what happened in my acid trip was like an echo of what I might experience later. As if giant trauma memories from the future would be impressed upon me as well as the past.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The time warp in Panter\u2019s bad-trip hallucination\u2014of the past pressing forward and the future echoing backward, both converging on the fleeting present\u2014is a counterpart to Walter Benjamin\u2019s terrifying vision of the angel of history:<\/p>\n

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But the storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both visions come to pass in the final image of Adventures in Paradise<\/em>, in Jimbo\u2014his horrible deed at an end, his head tilted back and away from the mangled body of the horse, the day done. Smoggo calls him \u201can unlikely custodian for a living nuclear nightmare.\u201d Jimbo would have liked to repaired things but found the task impossible. He has been moving toward this moment from the first pages of the book, from a capitalist paradise, to the world in ruins, and then to whatever comes next.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. She has written widely on art, literature, and comics for <\/em>The New York Review of Books, the <\/em>New York Times, <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>Artforum, the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review for nearly a decade and edited two issues of the magazine as well as <\/em>The Writer\u2019s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from \u201cThe Paris Review\u201d Interviews.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise<\/a>, by Gary Panter<\/em>, published this week by New York Review Comics<\/em>. Copyright \u00a9 2021 by Nicole Rudick, courtesy of New York Review Comics.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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