Panter's trademark approach, as pointed out by friend Matt Groening, was to mix the techniques and knowledge of fine art and painting with a sort of casual, even crude, cartooning style. He called this kind of drawing "ratty" and in an 1985 interview with Dale Luciano in the Journal went so far as to make a distinction between making marks on the paper and drawing lines: "A line is a tool for making or defining an illusion. A mark is more a thing that exists for and by itself." This was a startling approach in the mid-1970s, even when after the undergrounds' rise comics of many kinds valued slickness in art and presentation.
Panter's stance would be irrelevant if the work that resulted wasn't so compelling and remarkable. The first Jimbo strip appeared in Slash magazine in 1976, although Panter told Luciano the character had been around since 1973. Jimbo's most memorable appearances were in RAW, where Panter's work stuck out even in that crowd, and in the solo volume published by Raw Books. One should read as much Jimbo as possible, because half of what impresses is the range of technique and approached on display - all in the service of some of the most surreal sequences in comics history. Even in the series' latest incarnation, a line of poor-selling comic books from Groening's Zongo line of creator-owned comics, Jimbo fascinates. There, seemingly tossed-off panels and cartoons are slowly revealed to be a vast, complex, and eminently logical epic work, shocking in the artistic bravado of several beautifully drawn sequences. And bonus of all bonuses, that epic is a hilarious, wonderfully loose and insightful story about the awful world in which we live - a fitting vehicle for the last great everyman character of the 20th Century.
