5 out of 5

Sicko comics come in a few breeds, from nigh-porno to overkill stupid to dumb, to not dumb enough… similar to horror, interestingly, and not so surprising that there seems to be a crossover in interests, then, for many of those involved in either scene…  …Aaand anyhow, despite having dabbled in the Sam Henderson world, and the Ivan Brunnetti world, I keep coming back to Johnny Ryan for the laffs.  Yes, his humor is as predictable as most people in this batch (tasteless and crude, with a dash of golden age newspaper comics thrown in), but where Johnny gets points above his peers is in the way he’ll just let his mind wander… it subverts the reliable pun into something from the core humor center of the brain.  I suppose this is most directly apparent in his four-panel stuff, or the one-pagers that are collected in Comic Book Holocaust and the like, which are fueled off of that just-keep-it-rolling-no-matter-what mentality, but I’ll miss Angry Youth Comix because it was the only place to get feature length stories that followed these nowhere threads to their anything but inevitable conclusions.  I should’ve waited to read these at home, but as soon as I was on the train post comic shop, I’d be opening up my new AYC and laughing at melted babies being shot to the moon or suits made from celebrity butts or whatever other nonsense came through.

While reading one issue might be enough for most to get the gist, what was equally rewarding about Johnny’s ongoing series was watching it grow.  Blechy is an ongoing character, and recently we have his epic Prison Pit, but Blechy is a one-page gag character and Prison Pit is very, very genre based, characters included.  Loady McGee and Sinus O’Gynus (essentially the two leads in AYC) were never developed as characters, per se, but you got such a great sense of the limits of their personalities as the series went on, also watching Mr. Ryan’s inking and drawing styles settle into something so bold and comfortable, familiar and yet uniquely from his hand.

Childish and offensive, I guess, but the “genius” here is in just letting the mind roam.  It’s obvious that Ryan finds this stuff funny, and isn’t above doing a kid-friendly joke or a surreal joke if he just wants to draw it or see it.