3 out of 5

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of this. Its subtitle / series – Tale of Terror – is pretty accurate, but that’s baked with Ryan’s nihilism and sense of humor. Sort of a longform narrative a la Prison Pit, but more XXX-Rated – if PP was a tribute to underground zines and splatter movies, ‘Fuck My Son’ meshes the former with something like Gutterballs, for whatever that’s worth – the book isn’t exactly funny, but isn’t exactly serious, either. I imagine Johnny taking a concept tickling his brain and letting it stew and express itself over a prestige length tale, and, as usual, it goes places unique to the artist, which means that it’s certainly juvenile but with a bizarre-ass undercurrent that, y’know, involves Queen Latifah. The little narrative details are just strange, while the story itself is pretty brutal: an elderly mother (or at least that’s how she’s drawn) who kidnaps a woman to… well, do as the title suggests. Why she might need to do that is within the realm of horror movies, but the visualization is pure Ryan. Where JR doubles down, though, is removing any kind of “no violence to children” ban we might find in even exploitation flicks, and then doubles down again as things escalate.

Without a Loady McGee-type sad sack to hang all of the grotesqueness off of, or the Heavy Metal drapery of Prison Pit, Fuck My Son proceeds with a kind of queasiness, though that’s possibly the point. Arted in a simple black and white ink style (or purple-ish and white), with Johnny purposefully sticking to doodle-y levels of detail and linework – perhaps this was a panel-a-day project, or somesuch? – and given an oversized printing by Mansion Press, I’ll be curious how / if the Tales of Terror continue. On its own, this issue feels admittedly like something new amongst the creator’s long-form stories, so while it didn’t really elicit any positive enough emotion to make me want to revisit it soon, it’s an interesting expression of something, and I look forward to seeing how it fits into Ryan’s overall career.