Broken Frontier

Jimbo's Inferno, by Gary Panter.  The Lost Prequel to Jimbo in Purgatory.  A Ridiculous Mis-Recounting Of Dante Alighieri's Immortal Inferno In Which Jimbo, Led By Valise, In Pursuit of The Soulpinx, Enters Focky Bocky, Vast Gloomrock Mallscape. Fantagraphics, 2006.

This week's column is the first of four columns devoted to an appreciation of the most impenetrable trip through Dante's Inferno ever to intrigue fans of the comics. 

Jimbo's Inferno stands in a long and honorable tradition of comics artists exploring hell, and among them, Jimmy Hatlo (Hatlo's Inferno) and Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm) have provided some truly nutty hilarity.  Like Dante, Hatlo and Peters take their readers to a distant and terrible terrain—hot, rocky, and painful—to skewer the ironies, irritants, and hypocrisies of their times.  In sharp contrast, Gary Panter sends Jimbo no further than a shopping mall called Focky Bocky.

But Focky Bocky is no ordinary shopping mall.  Between cantos 17 and 18, on pages 22 and 23, Panter includes a map of Focky Bocky, a "Gloom-Rock Life-Style Mall-Scape…that exists to serve only you, and you, and you."  Panter is famous for his graphic design, and this map does not disappoint.  A continuous outer wall encloses a seven-pointed moat.  The moat surrounds the mall, which is shaped like a seven-pointed star.  Each arm of the star has a tower at its point, and an intricate monorail system connects the towers and then zooms to every corner of the mall in bewildering triangular patterns.  The monorail's star pattern is reflected by a star-patterned "people mover" near the center of the mall.  At the very center of the mall, nine concentric rings descend into the underground, each ring smaller than the one above it.  At the bottom is the "Bottom-Most Pit of Focky Bocky."

The outer edges of the mall are full of fast food, where cotton candy, fudge, and chips compete with chicken-fried steak and enchiladas for the consumer's attention.  As the mall visitor moves closer to the center, however, the landmarks become less familiar.  "Cerberus," says one label, and another reads "Dr. Pepper River."  The forest and the desert seem out of place, and the strip clubs and the chicken ranch seem completely unlikely attractions for a mall.  What is this place?  An utterly wacky riff off of the ubiquitous labyrinth of consumerism, Focky Bocky is uniquely Panter, yet, as Panter says, "engorged with Dante's hell."

Indeed, Jimbo's Inferno is very faithful to Dante's epic poem.  Following Dante closely, Panter organized his comic into 34 cantos.  Dante's cantos are roughly 135-155 lines each, and Panter's cantos are normally 6 frames organized on one page, although occasionally he uses only 3 frames.  Panter helpfully numbers many of his cantos, inserting the Roman numerals into one of the frames.  He also titles his cantos in ways that call Dante's to mind. 

Panter's cantos are economical, adapting only the barest of key themes and plot developments from each of Dante's, and mystifying the reader with original dialogue, sometimes pious and sometimes obscure.  Panter preserves the key relationship, that between pilgrim and guide.  In Dante's Inferno, Dante himself is the pilgrim, while Virgil is his guide.  In Panter's Inferno, Panter's signature character Jimbo is the pilgrim, while his robot parole officer Valise is his guide.  Just as in Dante's poem, Jimbo converses with people he meets in the mall, at times heckling them and trading insults, at times making pious and judgmental speeches, and at times succumbing to fear or disgust.  Both works are defined by their forceful and unforgettable imagery.

Dante's Inferno is one of the seminal works of Western culture, telling a story of a poet who, on the Good Friday before Easter in the year 1300, goes on a journey through the Christian hell guided by another great poet of the Western tradition, Virgil.  The poem is devout, heretical, and direct.  Dante skewered the political and religious pretensions and hypocrisies of his day.  He also named names, showing characters from the past, and his own personal enemies in various torments, condemned for their sins.

Through his poem, Dante has had lasting influence on how we think about hell, sin, and punishment.  It was Dante who organized hell into nine circles, and who made us believe that each circle is lower than the last, containing sinners worse than the last.  It was Dante who bestowed a permanent sense of hierarchy on sins.  It was also Dante who gave us the notion of symbolic retribution, the idea that sinners are not only punished for their sins, but also by their sins.  One of the best examples of symbolic retribution came from Mike Peters, who in a Mother Goose and Grimm Sunday strip portrayed the guy who invented plastic wrapping for CDs, doomed for all eternity to try to unwrap them.

Even if we haven't read Dante, his influence is so great that when we encounter a work of art like Jimbo's Inferno, we look for certain elements.  We expect a cautionary tale, one that will define our sins and the sinners too.  We willingly join the protagonist on his journey, reading it as a pilgrimage and anticipating the spiritual enlightenment that comes at the end.  And we look for paradise, a sense of divinity and salvation embedded in the bleakness of punishment and pain. 

Over the next three weeks, Library of Babble will weigh these expectations, reading Jimbo's Inferno through the lens of Dante's Inferno for the moral, spiritual, and mystical meanings of a ride on a robot through the strange terrain of a mall called Focky Bocky.