Comic Artist Gary Panter’s Crude Drawings Riff on Dante, Punk, and Monster Movies

In Gary Panter’s drawings, a line is not the shortest path between two points, but a slow, wavering one, a termite’s crawl with endless detours and distractions. In the graphic novels, punk album art, band logos, and sketches he has produced between the 1970s and the present, this line is the constant. It intensifies his viewers’ gaze, forcing them to reexamine forms they thought they knew. In his epic graphic novel Jimbo in Purgatory (2004), whose titular character is a spiky-