3 out of 5

This is the same shtick as Curse Sword – a bonus why-does-he-do-this-to-himself project taken on by Ryan Browne – in which he takes an existing comic and replaces all of the dialogue in his particular crass and random stylings. Curse maintained a rolling flow of iterating-on-itself references that was entertaining, but definitely collapsed under piling up non-sequiturs the more exhausted Browne got; Grimace is the word-swap of the extra God Hates Astronauts issue being included in the (haven’t gotten my copy yet) GHA omnibus, and since this is a re-do of a book that was already written by Ryan, the randomness is kind of a better fit. Instead of the words kind of fighting the art, this issue was already wildly over-the-top, so doubling down on that with mentions of “Shitcoin” and spoiled coleslaw essentially “works” as dialogue.

I mean, if this was an actual first issue, we’d all lambaste Browne as a try-hard, but being familiar with his storytelling style in GHA, the “try-hard” aspect is required – Ryan has to purposefully dodge out of any consistency in order to pummel the joke into the ground, lest the book start to actually make sense and merit a followup.

Also similar to Curse Sword is that I doubt I’ll be rereading this; it’s kind of a one-time gag (done, er, twice I guess) and I feel like this is more of a community thing than a book you frame and recommend – like, it’s very much a Kickstarter reward, those funding Browne’s creative pursuits enjoying pushing him to take on even more work and be even sillier with it. However, as mentioned, because the shtick is a better fit for GHA than the pretty crowded Curse Words, it’s a more enjoyable gag, shaking your head at the nonsense the whole way through.