1 out of 5

Uh… what now?

Here’s my guess: when Chuck Austen was able to return to Strips as a self-published venture under his own White Buffaloe imprint, he had a reaction of some type at the risque stuff happening in the underground – Johnny Ryan, Peter Bagge, and so on – and figured it was time to unleash Austen, the ribald humorist, in all-out XXX goofy glory. That resulted in a single issue of HomePage, an anthology mag (which, according to the intro, was initially intended as a CD-ROM-based digital comic – glory be), featuring one-off gag strips that could make bids for bits in the eventual Scary Movie films – i.e. these are cringey bit of bouncing boobs and cumming cocks, working off of the “aren’t humans sillily sex-obsessed?” themes of Strips and other AO Austen stuff, but sans any storytelling.

In Crimson & Cobalt (so named because, in CD-ROM color, the two characters would’ve been so titularly shaded; the comic is black and white), a Californian lands on a planet, blessed with a body that’s suddenly muscular and well hung; he runs into a lady who has had a similar fate except upping the stereotypical female features: big boobs, big ass, skinny, ya know. They… run around for a bit and then there’s sex. Austen takes a shot at Image Comics, also suggestive of the motivations behind this book – people loved visuals-first Image; another sign of (to Chuck) the conflicting puritan values of comic readers, where crevice-clinging spandex outfits and giganto boobs a-bouncing are a-okay as long as they’re draped in violence and no actual sex – but there’s no real commentary here, just base-level gags, something a high schooler would jot down in a book.

The backup comic features a superheroine who’s nude except for an eyepatch. It’s not bad; there are some okay jokes, but it’s all, essentially, the same joke, and Chuck’s “every guy is a horny guy” fallback runs precariously close to rape humor on occasion.

Anyway, this stuff is drawn with the same technical proficiency as Strips and Hardball!; it’s a well-produced comic except for its almost frightening digital cover and the lack of beginning or ending to its strips… But it’s also puerile without the same surrealist / beat-poet type zeitgeist that guided a lot of those underground artists; it’s a middle-aged dude finally allowing himself to make some bathroom jokes out loud.