{"id":1,"date":"2007-09-04T18:22:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-05T01:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/johnny-ryan-review\/"},"modified":"2007-09-04T18:22:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-05T01:22:00","slug":"johnny-ryan-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/johnny-ryan-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnny Ryan Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a review of Johnny Ryan’s work in general, and of Angry Youth Comics #10 in particular. A shortened, less snarky version of this article was published in The Chicago Reader<\/a> in March 2006.<\/p>\n

Comics: They\u2019re Not Just For Pompous Blowhards Anymore!<\/p>\n

After a long and painful struggle, comic-books have finally made themselves more or less indistinguishable — in subject-matter, in marketing, in content, even in length \u2014 from just plain books. Whether it\u2019s Dan Clowes or David Foster Wallace, Art Spiegelman or John Updike, you hear the interview on Fresh Air, purchase the tome at the local chain bookstore, open it with the solemn joy of a humble seeker, and close it with new insight into the profound humanness of our shared ineffability. <\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s cartoonist Johnny Ryan\u2019s latest effort, Angry Youth Comix #10. Fifty pages of filthy one-panel gag cartoons in the worst possible taste, this is critical comicdoms drooling, atavistic doppelganger. You can\u2019t get it in bookstores, you can\u2019t even talk about it on NPR without violating FCC regulations, and the whole thing takes about ten minutes to read. There are no deep meanings (unless you count scatalogical double entendres) ; no poignant autobiographical details (unless Ryan\u2019s private life is exceedingly peculiar); no redeeming social value (unless you consider mocking Art Spiegelman to be some sort of philanthropic act.) Instead, Ryan\u2019s comic is composed entirely of dick jokes, tit jokes, fag jokes, abortion jokes, racist caricatures, blasphemy, and the occasional stupid pun.<\/p>\n

If that sounds like Ryan is just some snotty shock-jock \u2014 well, sure he is. But what\u2019s wrong with that? The fact is that comics has always been a uniquely snotty and shocking medium. Wilhelm Busch\u2019s 1865 \u201cMax and Moritz\u201d \u2014 often considered the first comic-strip \u2014 featured two naughty prepubescent German pranksters who inventively brutalize all and sundry until they are captured, dumped in a flour mill, ground to bits, and eaten by ducks. The gore and goofiness wasn\u2019t necessarily Busch\u2019s fault: comics just seem to lend themselves to over-the-top imagery. Most of the greatest work in the medium \u2014 Jack Cole\u2019s Plastic Man, the EC comics horror titles, Jack Kirby\u2019s super-hero art, George Herriman\u2019s Krazy Kat \u2014 rely on slapstick or the macabre or hyperbolic violence or some combination of all three. Sure, today \u201ccomics for adults\u201d may denote politely edifying creators like Craig Thompson or Jessica Abel, but it wasn\u2019t so long ago that that same phrase referred to R. Crumb, Robert Williams, and other underground artists whose work overflowed with giant reproductive organs, hideous epithets, bizarre sexual conglomerations, and gratuitous everything. And in case anyone had forgotten, the riots which greeted the publication of Danish gags depicting Muhammad reminded the world that nothing offends quite as thoroughly as a really offensive cartoon. <\/p>\n

Political cartoons can be plenty dull and predictable, of course: as a non-Muslim, my reaction to the Danish cartoons was basically, \u201ceh.\u201d Still, it\u2019s hard to read anything by Johnny Ryan without feeling that comic-books lost something important when they opted to largely abandon the sight gags and overblown obnoxiousness to the editorial pages. Sure, you can use comics to chronicle either a Bildungsroman or an endless fight against evil if you want to. The truth, though is that those kinds of stories could really just as easily be novels or films. But in what other medium (other than comics\u2019 bastard step-child, animation) can you show, as Ryan does, the moon using some poor unfortunate as a tampon? Or a dead baby in the park with a kite at the end of its bloody umbilical cord? Or the tragedy of brain-piss? In fact, many of these cartoons are so bizarre they can\u2019t even be effectively put into prose \u2014 one gag with the caption \u201cOh, don\u2019t mind me!\u201d involves a man, a woman, a blow-job, and a discontented bystander, but I\u2019ll be damned if I can figure out an economical way to describe the exact mechanics of the scene.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason it\u2019s hard to imagine many of these gags as anything other than cartoons, though, is simply because it\u2019s hard to imagine anyone but Johnny Ryan thinking of them. His subject-matter may be limited, and his black-and-white line art is efficient rather than dazzling, but there aren\u2019t many artists in any field who can match Ryan for sheer surreal creativity. His longer strips suggest a filthy hybrid of the Marx Bros. and Monty Python; the full-length story in Angry Youth Comix #9 included a single sequence in which a bald man is blessed with a wig made out of shit, propositioned by a passer-by, has his penis inconveniently detach, obtains penis-glue, loses his shit-wig, asks a passer-by to defecate on his head…and that\u2019s just the set-up for the punch-line. The single panel jokes in #10 don\u2019t match that level of manic intensity, but they have their own virtues. The best gags, in fact, seem like humor\u2019s distilled essence; middle-school, smart-ass witticisms raised to a sublime and unsurpassable height. There will never be a funnier super-hero parody than Fucked-Up Man, whose main power appears to involve intercourse with a duck. Nor will there ever be a funnier penis joke than Ryan\u2019s gag about the Salem Dick-Witch trials.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not like I\u2019m the first person to rave enthusiastically about Ryan\u2019s work. He\u2019s been praised by lots of comics luminaries, from Robert Williams to Ivan Brunetti to Dan Clowes to Peter Bagge. And yet, the critical enthusiasm often seems to come with a certain nervous backwards glance over the shoulder. His comic is put out by Fantagraphics, one of the most important independent comics publishers \u2014 but both owners of the company have publicly expressed reservations of one sort or another about his work. He gets a fair number of positive reviews in the comics press\u2014 but those reviewers hasten to notify their readers that Angry Youth Comics isn\u2019t necessarily for everyone. Ryan readily admits as much himself, but I\u2019m not quite sure why it has to be stressed. After all, whose work is for everyone, exactly? Chris Ware\u2019s?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t wish on Ryan \u2014 or on anyone \u2014 the clouds of hagiography that hang about Ware\u2019s cranium like some sort of oleaginous shroud. But I do think AYC deserves better from comics taste-makers than a slightly embarrassed pat on the head. Ryan\u2019s work is smart, crammed with ideas, and so funny it will melt your retinas. Moreover it seems to me that whatever the limitations of its appeal, it would be immediately accessible to a huge number of people\u2014 fans of South Park, for example \u2014 who don\u2019t necessarily read comics.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s important, because the audience for American comics right now is vanishingly small, and only likely to shrink further as imported manga from Japan snaps up more and more shelf-space and attention. In the face of vast public indifference, super-hero publishers have basically given up on marketing comics altogether, and have instead shifted their attention almost entirely to selling their properties to Hollywood. Meanwhile, smaller publishers \u2014 like Fantagraphics \u2014 concentrate most of their limited promotional oomph on relentlessly snooty releases like the anthology Mome. When Ryan has managed to get mainstream media coverage, it\u2019s generally been quite positive: he was featured in Rolling Stone\u2019s annual Hot List last September, for example. But given comics\u2019 low profile, and his own industry\u2019s ambivalence, it\u2019s going to be a long, long time before Johnny Ryan becomes a household name. As it is, you\u2019ve got to make some effort if you even want to find his stuff. He does have several excellent trade paperback collections, though I\u2019ve never seen one in a bookstore myself. As for AYC # 10, It\u2019s available online at fantagraphics.com<\/a>, and, to the best of my knowledge, at only two stores in Chicago: Quimby\u2019s Queer Store<\/a> and Chicago Comics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[I contacted Fantagraphics, and they corrected me: AYC is also sold through Alternate Reality, Inc. (couldn\u2019t find a website) and Comix Revolution<\/a>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a review of Johnny Ryan’s work in general, and of Angry Youth Comics #10 in particular. A shortened, less snarky version of this article was published in The Chicago Reader in March 2006. Comics: They\u2019re Not Just For … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodedutilitarian.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}