{"id":13510,"date":"2015-05-11T12:08:29","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T12:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=13510"},"modified":"2015-05-11T12:08:29","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T12:08:29","slug":"angry-youth-comics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2015\/05\/11\/angry-youth-comics\/","title":{"rendered":"Angry Youth Comics"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Johnny Ryan<\/strong> (Fantagraphics Books)
\nISBN: 978-1-56097-867-1<\/p>\n

This book is full of rude and vulgar words, nasty sex and terrible pictures. There’s also lots of disgusting violence but that’s generally acceptable to most people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, if such adult-oriented material offends you, don’t read this review or the book.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You will however have to find something else to get angry and complain about\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/strong><\/p>\n

Graphic narrative and cartooning, despite our regular protestations of comprising a comparatively small pond, cover a vast range of genres, formats, disciplines and tastes. From Tintin<\/strong> or Raymond Brigg’s Snowman<\/strong> through the various escapist mainstreams to the edgy, unpredictable and even the downright shocking.<\/p>\n

Johnny Ryan is a comedian who uses comics as his medium of expression. Whether in his Prison Pit<\/strong> series, or his many commissions for such varied clients as Nickelodeon<\/strong>, Hustler<\/strong>, Vice<\/strong>, Arthur<\/strong>, National Geographic Kids<\/strong> and elsewhere, his job and passion is to make laughter. Depending on your point of view he is either a filth-obsessed pervert smut-monger or a social iconoclast using the same tactics as Hogarth, Gillray and Cruikshank or more recently Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks or Frankie Boyle to challenge the worst aspects of our society.<\/p>\n

Ryan’s loose cartoon drawing style is deceptively engrossing and engagingly excessive whilst his seeming pictorial Tourette’s Syndrome of strips and gags – involving such signature characters as Boobs Pooter<\/em> (world’s most disgusting stand-up comedian), Loady McGee<\/em> & Sinus O’Gynus<\/em>, Sherlock McRape<\/em> and the incredible Blecky Yuckeralla<\/em> (originally seen weekly from 2003 in The Portland<\/strong> Mercury<\/strong> and Vice Magazine<\/strong> before switching to Ryan’s own on-line site) – will, frankly, appal and baffle many readers, but as with most questions of censorship in a Free Society, the naysayers are completely at liberty to neither buy nor read the stuff.<\/p>\n

Ryan dubbed his stinging graphic assaults on American Culture and Political Correctness \u00e2\u20ac\u0153misanthropic comics\u00e2\u20ac\u009d after first coming to public attention through his occasional comicbook series Angry Youth Comix<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Originally produced as self-published minicomics from 1994-1999, the strips were brought then to the attention of Fantagraphics by Peter Bagge and the company promptly commissioned a second volume.<\/p>\n

Now this spectacular and colossal (424 pages, 273 x 184mm) monochrome hardback tome gathers all fourteen of those staggering assaults on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153taste and decency\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (first issued between 2001 to 2008) in one monolithic compendium of raucous, riotous baroque hilarity\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Ryan is a cartoonist with an uncompromising vision and an insatiable desire to shock and revolt whenever he wants to. In his ongoing Prison Pit<\/strong> series he perpetually pushes the graphic narrative envelope and the outer limits of taste with a brutal, primitive cascade of casual violence and there’s plenty of senseless carnage and casual slaughter on show here too, but deftly woven into a never-ending barrage of grossly outrageous confrontations and a barrage of bracing, despicable filth. Or you could just see the funny side of it\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

In this non-stop welter of exceedingly excessive force, vile excrescences, constant cultural clashes, scatological salvoes and sheer unadulterated graphic carnage can be seen a never-ending Darwinian struggle of witty license and disgraceful debauchery.<\/p>\n

The only truly gratuitous thing however would be a complete listing of strips and gags contained herein, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t especially recommend ‘Loady McGee & Sinus O’Gynus in the Whorehouse of Dr. Moreau’<\/em>, ‘Marshmallow & Snowflake in It’s the\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 Ku Klux Kuties’<\/em>, ‘My Dad Went to a Concentration Camp and it Was Okay’<\/em>, ‘1976’<\/em>, ‘Sherlock McRape in Who Hit Nelly in the Belly With Jelly?’<\/em> or ‘Boobs Pooter’s Joke-Pocalypse’<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6every one an unforgettably disgusting laugh-riot\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Also included in a special full colour section are the 28 brilliantly imaginative front & back covers as well as all the contentious and wonderful letters pages from the magazine’s run to complete your shock-jock flavoured enjoyment\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

This is a brutally macabre yet beguiling, loathsomely intriguing miracle of cartoon exuberance; appalling, dismaying, cathartic and horridly, blackly humorous – always forcing the reader to think and challenge their own preconceptions.<\/p>\n

Resplendent, triumphant juvenilia and selfish self-interest have been adroitly catapulted beyond all ethical limits into the darkest depths of absurdist comedy. This is a non-stop rollercoaster of brain-blistering profound profanity; pictorial purgatory at its most gorge-rising and compelling.<\/p>\n

Not for kids, the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, here is extreme cartooning at its most visceral and pure. Gross, vulgar, shocking strips and panel gags about sex, defecation, bodily functions (particularly the many types of farting), feminine hygiene – and men’s lack of same – comics, toys, knob-gags and even the ultimate modern taboos of religion, politics, race and child abuse are all here and waiting to get you\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

And now that we’ve placated the intellectual\/moral imperative inside us all, I’ll also affirm that this titanic tome is another, all-out, over the top, indisputably hilarious hoot. Buy it and see if you’re broad-minded, fundamentally honest and purely in need of ultra-adult silliness. If you aren’t any of those things but could stand a good, hearty laugh that might also make you think, then this is also the dirty cartoon joke-book for you.
\nAll contents \u00c2\u00a9 2015 Johnny Ryan (except where it isn’t). This edition \u00c2\u00a9 2015 Fantagraphics Books Inc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics Books) ISBN: 978-1-56097-867-1 This book is full of rude and vulgar words, nasty sex and terrible pictures. There’s also lots of disgusting violence but that’s generally acceptable to most people. So, if such adult-oriented material offends you, don’t read this review or the book. You will however have to find something … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Angry Youth Comics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64,113,78,105,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adulterotica","category-comedy","category-comic-strip-classics","category-mature-reading","category-satirepolitics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-3vU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}