Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise

By Gary Panter

A new edition edited and with an afterword by Nicole Rudick
Foreword by Ed Ruscha
New York Review Comics, March 30, 2021

Gary Panter is one of America’s great creative forces: the illustrator for the trailblazing punk magazine Slash, set designer for the legendary TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and one of the wildest, most innovative comics artists of all time. Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise is a leap into the uproarious life of Panter’s ever-cheerful punk everyman, Jimbo, and a perfect introduction to Panter’s ever-shifting style. Amid a jumbled cityscape of rundown New York City streets and futuristic Los Angeles freeways, Jimbo crowd-surfs at a riot, makes amends with Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and rescues his pal Smoggo’s sister from giant cockroaches, all while the world teeters between extravagance and apocalypse.

Veering from the crude to the elegant, the wise to the funny, Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise proves Panter is a master of cartooning, and still way ahead of the rest of us.

“Gary Panter is deeply good, wise, and humble, despite possessing an inimitable sense of line and color, an extraterrestrial imagination, and a direct pipeline to his kid self. I’d say he was my role model if I could only aspire that high.” —Luc Sante

“Nicole Rudick’s excellent afterword situates Panter as a visionary amid a flood of movements, influences, declarations (his own ‘Rozz-Tox Manifesto,’ originally published as want ads, looked for inspiration in smashed-up capitalism) and artistic fellow travelers.” —Ed Park, New York Times Book Review

[listen] Gary and Nicole on “All Of It with Alison Stewart,” April 27, 2021