Jimbo in Purgatory

Jimbo’s Inferno charted the journey of Gary Panter’s eponymous hero through the hellscape of the modern mall. Jimbo in Purgatory continues with Jimbo and Valise, his parole robot, this time traveling through a Purgatory re-imagined as an “infotainment testing facility.” Panter opens the volume with a short introduction on the life and times of Dante. He lays out Dante’s literary legacy, since the Divine Comedy directly influenced Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, and James Joyce.

The book is a scant thirty-three pages and measures even larger than Jimbo’s Inferno, but the cover retaining Inferno’s faux Klimtian gilt highlights. Jimbo and Valise travel and encounter various pop cultural icons as they quote excerpts from show more Dante, Boccaccio, Joyce, dirty limericks, and numerous other sources. The sources are referenced at the bottom of each page, but are unnumbered, adding a challenge to interpretation. Dante’s Purgatory begins with Dante and Vergil meeting Cato. Panter has Jimbo and Valise meeting Cato Fong, Inspector Clouseau’s houseboy and martial arts expert. Jimbo and Valise also converse with the disembodied head of the Westworld character played by Yul Brynner. At the end of Dante’s tour of Purgatory, he finally meets his long lost love, the luminous Beatrice, the personification of beauty and innocence, a terrestrial counterpart to the Virgin Mary within Catholic doctrine. Within the subversive grammar of Panter’s vision, Beatrice is portrayed as Twiggy (real name: Lesley Hornby). Twiggy fame and notoriety originated in her thinness as a fashion model.

Throughout the book, Panter maintains a rigid almost mannerist division of panels. On some pages, the narrative moves forward. On others, the panels split up a massive picture. The division of images and architectural design harkens back to another monument of Christian doctrine, the Sistine Chapel, itself an innovative amalgamation of Christian and Greco-Roman classical imagery.

The volume ends like Jimbo’s Inferno: with a list of thirty-three albums that Gary Panter fancied, from the well-known (Electric Ladyland, The Jimi Hendrix Experience) to the rare (Science Fiction, Ornette Coleman) to the just plain odd (Music for Robots, Forrest J. Ackerman). Using the grammar of pop culture and sampling the Western Canon like an encyclopedic DJ, Panter spins an epic journey. A hallucination and a dream that plays like a labyrinthine knock-knock joke.

This review is part of a blog post examining how different artists depict Hell:

http://driftlessareareview.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/critical-appraisal-the-lands... show less