Johnny Ryan, Fantagraphics

Everything bad that you’d care to say about Angry Youth Comics is true. It’s repellant, racist, juvenile, mindless, repetitive, and pornographic, and I can completely understand why someone might absolutely hate it. I love it. Angry Youth Comics is living proof that a bad joke repeated often enough becomes funny, and a bad joke pushed far enough is good. Neither enough nor too much is enough. You wouldn’t laugh at a retarded person, and you wouldn’t laugh at Hitler, but what about a character named Retarded Hitler? If Sam Henderson is a little too intellectual for you, if Tijuana bibles aren’t quite scatological enough, if Doofus is too well drawn for your taste, you’ve got a friend in Johnny Ryan.

One thing it’s easy to forget is how skilled a satirist Ryan is. When he has a character say, “This vagina growing on my back itches,” that’s as good a summary of Charles Burns’s oeuvre as any. Many of his jokes are, in addition to being a kind of parody of the act of joking itself , something approaching a social critique. When Loady McGee says, “Seeing a guy without a kid on his dick makes me want to vomit,” it’s not just funny because pederasty is funny and I’m a terrible person. It’s also funny because Loady’s self-righteousness and extreme disgust over someone’s failure to embrace the latest fad (which happens, in this comic, to be pederasty) makes him a recognizable “type,” and sodomizing children merely points to the ludicrousness of trendsters.

XXX Scumbag Party collects issues 6-10 of Angry Youth Comics, the period when Ryan comes into his own, and, perhaps not incidentally the period when he switched from short pieces to long form, free flowing, surreal stories. If the quote, “A UFO? Oh boy I’ll get the anal lube!” makes you laugh, maybe Johnny Ryan is for you. If it doesn’t, maybe (as Blecky Yuckarella says is issue ten) you’re just too stupid to realize that the baby boner was a symbol of America’s creative zeitgeist.

Issue #13, also released last month, is pretty much the same thing, but with more blasphemy and a photo cover (!).