ANGRY YOUTH COMIX #13
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS
CARTOONIST: Johnny Ryan
24 pp., B&W, $3.50
Johnny Ryan releases more of his “adults only” brand of brutally crude and crudely brutal comedy in Angry Youth Comix #13. This time, his scatological humor is so rank that even some adults aren’t ready for it. Luckily, this reviewer is.
Ryan opens AYC #13 with a rude appetizer – a foul ghost story starring the vulgar comedian Boobs Pooter, who, this time around, only wants to tell a few ghost jokes (more like practical jokes) After Boobs blows his own brains out, his boorish ghost escapes his body and begins pulling horrid pranks on the unsuspecting living.
The fecal main course is “Payback,” starring the murderous loser, Loady McGee. When he discovers that a mysterious cartoonist, the Fantastic Fantom, has created an award-winning comic that lampoons and ridicules his life, Loady demands bloody-hell retribution. With the assistance of his retarded chump of a friend, Sinus O’Gynus, Loady kidnaps two suspects and subjects them to the kind of torture and punishment that would earn him his own crimes against humanity trial. We also learn that Loady does have religion, but wait until you discover whom he worships…
In “The Day the New Yorker Came to Town,” the New Yorker Magazine (literally, and boy is he a well endowed periodical) visits the National Cartoonist Society, Inc. to recruit new cartooning talent for the latest issue. After an afternoon romp or ethnic slurs and sodomy, who will earn a spot in this prestigious magazine?
Is AYC #13, Ryan’s best work? It may be. It certainly is the most consistent in terms of being funny, appalling, filthy, and ghastly. What amazes me is how he keeps coming up with this stuff and making it outrageously funny. There are no Eisners in his future, even for “Humor Publication” (or whatever they call it), but there has been no funnier cartoonist in American comics for at least the last three years.
If the Eisners were less about politics and who is likeable and more about art, then, Ryan could give Loady an Eisner to stick up his butt.
A
Read the review of Ryan's latest book collection.
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