What He Saw

In 1985, Panter moved to Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife of 12 years, Helene Silverman, and their 11-year-old daughter, Olive. Panter devoted much of his energy this year to staging a 25-minute light show, which he presented by appointment at his studio. He built puppets, too, and created what he describes as "an anonymous crew of 18 confused Euro-disco men and women that have little furry outfits." He spends half an hour every day practicing the guitar, and recently finished four cartoons — including "Pink Donkey and the Fly" — that can be downloaded from cartoonnetwork.com.

Panter keeps busy, but he never forgets the lurking darkness. His drawings often look as if they might've been executed with a fork, and descriptions of his work invariably mention his "ratty line." It is indeed a crabbed, desperate scratch, but it serves as an effective counterpoint to his themes, which are never less than epic. Panter recently completed "Jimbo in Purgatory," an ambitious retelling of the Dante classic that was three years in the making, comprises 912 panels on 33 tabloid-size pages, and cross-references Boccaccio's Decameron and the writings of Sophocles. In a similar vein is "Cola Madnes," a graphic novel published last year that was originally written in 1983 and based on notes Panter made for a puppet show during the '70s. The book opens as the King of America invites Jimbo to a party with the promise "Tonight the world is turning upside-down." As the narrative progresses, characters are tortured and arbitrarily attack one another, Jimbo's Uncle Garcia wakes him in the morning by throwing a bomb into his bedroom, and explosions burst forth from every corner. A decapitated head floating in a sewage pipe utters its final words: "Sad to spend my last moments on earth in a vat of shit." It's a harrowing book.

Panter conjures a brutal world whose center cannot hold, a world filled with ominous symbols pregnant with dark meaning, governed by indomitable currents of energy generated by crime and punishment. Panter's had this world in his head for a long time, so it must have been strange for him to look out his window on September 11 and see it materialize before his eyes.