"In comics," says Panter, 53, from his messy studio in Brooklyn, "you're always trying to take people somewhere and convince them they're there for a moment." So far, it's a trip that's taken him and his square-jawed protagonist from the pages of the seminal Los Angeles punk zine Slash to the alternative comics anthology Raw to Jimbo's own self-titled series, published by Matt Groening's Zongo Comics. "When I started the Zongo series," says Panter, "the strips were super simple. But each issue I made it a little more detailed than the last." By the end of Jimbo's seven-issue run, the hero had progressed from surreal urban settings to Dante's Inferno, and Panter (who won three Emmys as head set designer for Pee-Wee's Playhouse) had developed an intricate illustration style filled with obscure references and even footnotes. "I was reading a lot of James Joyce," he says, "and I decided to do a comic that was really over-the-top in terms of complexity."
