3 out of 5

Maybe it was the anticipation.  Maybe it was Yungbluth-overkill, as Peek! had me hunting down all the Deep Fried I could find, only to be made to wait for stars to align so I could purchase volume 2.  Now here it is!  …And it’s okay?

Following in the vein of the first volume, DF follows, primarily, deviants Beepo and Roadkill as they lose jobs, do drugs, go to Canada, and etc. in short, generally unconnected sketches.  Elsewhere, we get some Cassandra (the only ‘comedy’ strip about a girl being raped by her father?), Weapon Brown (a genius dystopic Charlie Brown), and some odds and ends.  I found the odds and ends most appealing, especially the fake-comic-ad backmatter, but the strips are by and large still amusing.  Yungbluth, the application of his humor aside, is a great talent, balancing zany Chuck Jones / Jon Kricfalusi expressionism with great visual comic book timing.  And it’s not that the jokes aren’t still funny, if overly-offensive is in your wheelhouse, it’s just that the post-9/11 world opens the humor up to some politics, and it almost seems like Jason feels the need to balance the “commentary” with more gross-out gags.  This is really only an issue in the first book, but it taints the remaining volumes.  Issues 3 and 4 do recover, coming back around to the first volume’s greatness.