5 out of 5

Johnny Ryan’s content evolution into the modern age has been interesting. I do think there was a struggle to understand how he fit in when cultural sensitivities started viewing what we might’ve called subversive humor with a bit more scrutiny. Ryan would poke and prod at things as they fluttered through the general social conversation, but we’d also see his material recede from and reemerge on various social platforms, and he now appears to have a good relationship with French publisher Mansion Press.

Noting that this is all completely my internal narrative, and that I don’t dive into social media much – so it’s very possible this has been explained in detail thereabouts and is completely different than I’ve described – my worry, from afar, was that Ryan was sticking to the style of the more aggressively baiting gags of AYC and his Vice work and the like (this was never all of his humor, by any means, but was, at the same time, definitely a part of it), and so had had to retreat to paid tiers and foreign publishers to keep getting funded.

But… no. While, again, I’m just making things up, which is a fantastic way to create a factual list of events, though some of what I’ve said was surely an influence on factors, I think we’ve just seen Ryan finding a more comfortable model that works for him, and keeps him doing what he wants, while his material has shifted into a fascinating fever dream of sexual perversion and totemic imagery, and movie / commercial riffs. And then, sometimes, just straight illustrations of some concept or thought. It’s not “mature,” but it’s arguably more fascinating than what came before (I still enjoy that stuff, however) as it’s not subject to the sometimes forced nature of the “subversive” stuff.

So, anyway, we have Wet Market: Shouldn’t You Be Working? style sketch collections, published by The Mansion Press, in full color. The color helps to underline Ryan’s skills: these are “sketches” in the sense that they’re sometimes just a single figure, no background, but we get plenty of fully colored, fully inked, polished pictures, and while cartoonish, you can sit there and just kind of go over the linework and the color choices and the various bits and pieces at play in the pics – there’s often a lot going on. Yeah, there’s lots of pooping and cum and violence, but few can compete with the bonkers ways Ryan splashes this stuff on the page, where incredibly bizarre sexual acts – sorry to kink shame those who like jerking off rats – are presented as Sunday comics. My favorite is the selfie the naked ladies take showing off their poops.

All of this is to say: if you’ve enjoyed any of Ryan’s 2020s collections of art, this is right in line, but especially consistent: I’d consider almost every page full illustration, and a fully defined idea, with a lot of 2-page splashes of outright anarchy to stop and pause and shake your head at in confused glee.