4 out of 5

Oh geez, he done did it again: Ryan Browne has committed to wholly rescripting a pre-existing God Hates Astronauts issue, plopping in new words into all those wordy bubbles of the floppy he already done sweated over. ‘Angry!’ is this for the newly started 2023 iterations of GHA, and setting aside a forthcoming review of that series, once it completes, this rescripted outing is probably one of Ryan’s best, as these things are an understandable struggle: trying to craft something of a one-shot story in a book that’s already chockful of random humor, meaning it’s not like you’re taking a straight story and making it silly – you’re taking something already outlandish, and trying to milk it for a different flavor of outlandishness. I don’t envy the task.

Indeed, this has often led to Browne understandably giving up partway through these things, talking to himself / the reader about how hard it is to rescript the books, and that happens in Gosh, He’s Angry!, but I’d say Browne has also learned what to expect a bit more from these commitments, so it feels… lighter in its complaints, and the “story” throughline of, uh, traveling back to the past to kill all those involved with Showgirls 2 so the main characters can make their own version of it (with lots of references to a pan and scan edition of the first movie on DVD) is actually maintained pretty well throughout! We inevitably have a few pages past the midpoint that go totally off topic, but Ryan doesn’t just lampshade his way back to a conclusion – he actually rights the ship as much as possible, and starts killing Showgirls 2 makers yet again, all within the confines of this already-drawn comic.

I laughed. I marveled at the effort. It’s a good gag, from a comic / concept that has give us so, so many good gags already, and apparently enough that you can double-down on a single issue and make it worth reading and owning in its different versions.