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)

Last week, Library of Babble introduced the main features of Gary Panter's hell.  Envisioned as a gloomy shopping mall called Focky Bocky, Panter's inferno is a bizarre "mallscape" that includes such unlikely characters as Cerberus, Ulysses, and giant robots.  While Focky Bocky superficially shares the features of a modern shopping mall, including playgrounds and food courts, it also encloses a fantastic inverted cone imitating the nine circles of Dante's hell.  While Panter warns readers not to search too hard for the parallels between his Inferno and Dante's, his comic book interpretation of Dante's Inferno invites the reader into a fresh consideration of the main moral, spiritual, and mystical themes of the original poem. 

This week, we consider the moral meaning of Jimbo's visit to Focky Bocky.  Unlike Dante, who infused sin and punishment with terrifying order and pitiless justice, Panter presents an ambiguous hell, one that replaces Dante's efficient regulation with chaotic, disgusting ickiness.  While Dante's poem conveyed a warning to the reader to avoid sin and thereby avoid punishment, Panter's comic replaces such moral instruction with intensely hideous scenes drawn with thick black lines and tortuous detail.  The dialogue is obscure, full of inside jokes, and nearly incomprehensible.  The imagery is blunt.  While we may not understand how the suffering characters in Panter's hell got there, we know we don't want to go.

Dante's Inferno contains impressive moral instruction.  Sin and punishment figure prominently in the poem, and the punishments uniquely fit the crimes.  Scandalmongers and gossips, divisive individuals in life, are continually, and physically, sliced apart for eternity.  Liars, impostors, and counterfeiters, who were corrupting influences in their time, suffer corrupted and diseased bodies and minds.  Diviners, who in life claimed to be able to see the future, are condemned forever to walk with their heads twisted painfully backward on their necks, only able to see behind them.  In Dante's hell, the relationship between the sin and the punishment is painfully and efficiently logical, and the message is clear: don't commit this sin, unless you want to end up like this.

Panter's Inferno contains impressive imagery.  Suffering figures prominently, but in contrast to Dante's account of hell, the sin is absent.  Drug addicts die in their own filth.  A weeping man is torn open by a lizard, his entrails removed and spun into elaborate patterns.  A man with no skin uses his own sword to cut himself open and cut off his own head.  In a strange flat plain, people are buried up to their necks.  They chew on each other's heads. One character is repeatedly incinerated, only to rise from the ashes to be incinerated again.  "Don't watch: it's humiliating," he tells Jimbo.  "May you die of grief."

Dante explains the sins of the condemned sufferers encountered on the journey through hell, but in Jimbo's Inferno, there are no tales of sin to give sense to the suffering.  Jimbo chats with the suffering people, but the dialogue is impenetrable.  In Canto X (p. 14), Jimbo and his guide Valise visit Kilroy's Fifth Amendment Bottom-Lit Spa-Bar.  (In Dante's tenth canto, Dante and his guide Virgil visit the tombs where the Epicureans are buried.)  Jimbo discovers some friends there.

Drunk #1: Hey, Jimbo.  You know me!  Have a drink with Zipper and Gruden.  Hell, we're drinking with a firm resolve, Jimmy.
Drunk #2: H-How's Bob War, Dimbo? Hic!
Jimbo: Why doesn't he just call Bob up on his comtat?
Drunk #1: He threw the phase out on the tatcom.  He wet it.
Valise: Time to move onward.
Drunk #1: You fucker, stay here and drink with me.  Are you too good for us?
Jimbo: Thy obdurate rages profit thee not.  Now I must away.  Tell him Bob lives in Garcia's pool.

Similar dialogue occurs throughout Jimbo's trip through Focky Bocky.  The conversations between Jimbo and the sufferers, and the commentaries from Jimbo's guide Valise do little to make sense of the suffering of those trapped in the mall's nine infernal circles.  Indeed, the only moral discernment comes from Jimbo, whose pious pronouncements make him sound like a member of the Moral Majority.  When a trio of young women die of an overdose, Jimbo comments, "An unthinkable waste of cute girls."  When he encounters a prostitute covered in shit, he says, "I hope you are using condoms."  Much like his model Dante, Jimbo has little pity for the suffering souls he meets in Focky Bocky.

The obtuse dialogue helps create a sense that Jimbo's Inferno is a confusing series of repulsive vignettes with no obvious meaning.  Are these people dead?  Are they in Focky Bocky by choice, or sentenced there by divine judgment?  Are they being punished?  Are they unlucky?  Or is this all a part of a normal day at the mall? 

The moral clarity of Dante's Inferno is lost in the chaos of Focky Bocky.  You may not want to end up like this, but you're not sure what these people did to deserve their pain.  In this respect, Jimbo's Inferno neatly captures our contemporary moral malaise.  Suffering is arbitrary, its intensity and duration unmitigated by innocence or goodness.  No one seems to be in charge.  But because of the meaninglessness of it all, Panter's comic is unsatisfying.  The confusing dialogue reduces the comic to something idiosyncratic, and ultimately forgettable.