Jimbo's Inferno (2006)

Gary Panter is a crucial latter-day artist, one who has fused comic-book and modern-art styles. Coming to prominence in the punk-era '70s, Panter took advantage of the way punk — particularly in its Los Angeles incarnation, in bands such as X and the Germs — combined familiar pop images with brutally frank directness. But Panter was never a merely angry punk artist; he channeled his aggression into interestingly non-narrative comic strips and covers for Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking RAW ''comix'' magazine, and he worked continuously, ceaselessly, in a variety of mediums, from the comic strip to canvas paintings to magazine illustration (including for EW). And he also copped three Emmys for his kiddie-delic set designs on the great children's show Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

Jimbo is the muscular, buzz-cut adventurer whom Panter has used over the years not as an alter ego or a superhero but as an Everyman. In Jimbo's Inferno, a fractured retelling of Dante's, Jimbo is a wary innocent traveling through the most heinous atmosphere Panter can imagine. For this artist, ''hell'' is just two letters away from spelling ''mall'': a gigantic, brain-numbing, info-commerce center called Focky Bocky. Jimbo also journeys across fiery lakes filled with dragons, encounters temptation in the form of evil drugs (observing a group of overdosed women, he comments, ''An unthinkable waste of cute girls''), and barely escapes from a massive minotaur. Equally offended by ''gloom rockers'' and ''a glut of self-made men who have bred excess and pride,'' Jimbo charts a dangerous path that adult readers will appreciate as one of the few depictions of the netherworld that owes nothing to the oft-imitated nightmare-dream work of Hieronymus Bosch or Salvador Dali. Panter is a greater artist than either of these, as this book and its predecesor, Jimbo In Purgatory, make vividly clear.

All this, plus the last page: ''Thirty-Three Best Loved Vinyl Recordings,'' a bravura drawing/list that has nothing to do with the Inferno but which will guide you to buying great music by bands like Pere Ubu and Shockabilly. It's hard to beat Panter for sheer imaginativeness, open-heartedness, and hard-headedness.