Angry Youth Comix #10
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And then there’s Johnny Ryan’s latest effort, Angry Youth Comix #10. Fifty pages of filthy one-panel gag cartoons in the worst possible taste, this is the graphic novel’s drooling, atavistic doppelganger. You can’t get it at Borders, you can’t talk about it on NPR without violating FCC regulations, and the whole thing takes about ten minutes to read. It has no deeper meaning, no poignant autobiographical details, and no redeeming social value, unless you consider mocking Art Spiegelman to be some sort of philanthropic act. Instead, Ryan’s comic consists entirely of dick jokes, tit jokes, fag jokes, abortion jokes, racist caricatures, blasphemy, and the occasional stupid pun.
If it sounds like Ryan is just some snotty shock jock–well, he is. But what’s wrong with that? Comics have always been a snotty and shocking medium. Wilhelm Busch’s 1865 Max und Moritz–often considered the first comic strip–featured two naughty prepubescent German pranksters who inventively brutalized all and sundry until they were captured, dumped in a flour mill, ground to bits, and eaten by ducks. Most of the greatest work in comics–Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, EC Comics’s horror titles, Jack Kirby’s superheroes, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat–relies on slapstick, hyperbolic violence, the macabre, or some combination of the three. Sure, today “comics for adults” may denote politely edifying auteurs like Craig Thompson or Jessica Abel, but it wasn’t so long ago that that same phrase referred to R. Crumb, Robert Williams, and other underground artists whose work overflowed with giant reproductive organs, hideous epithets, bizarre sexual conglomerations, and gratuitous everything. And in case anyone had forgotten, the riots that greeted the publication of Danish gags depicting Muhammad reminded the world that nothing offends quite as thoroughly as a really offensive cartoon.
