Jesus Fucking Christ
Prison Pit Book One
This is the best comic Johnny Ryan has ever drawn. And I'm the guy that ranked the last Angry Youth Comix in his Best of 2008. It's coming soon from Fantagraphics, a 120-page softcover for $12.99. I'll tell you when it's out, so you can buy it.
Funny thing about Ryan: his reputation as a relentless gross out gag man tends to obscure how versatile his art can be, and how catholic he is with format. He's got his Angry Youth pamphlet comic; his Blecky Yuckarella strip styled like a newspaper daily; comics and illustrations in magazines; limited edition minicomics collected into small books - and all of them are different in how they approach the comedy. Hell, Angry Youth has been pushing itself harder into shock horror-in-comedy-form with every new issue, with corresponding advances in Ryan's control of pace; pit that against the unabashed dirty sketchbook glee of his minicomics, and you can see the ease with which he switches modes while remaining entirely himself.
Well here's the next step: the bookshelf-ready original series. It goes places even longtime readers might not expect.
The first thing you'll notice about Prison Pit is that it's as tightly controlled as recent Angry Youths issues, but much airier; most pages are four-panel grids, with splashes sometimes interrupting to emphasize massive landscapes. It's also oddly quiet - the first 17 pages have just over half a dozen panels with any dialogue at all, and what's there is curt chit-chat and shit-talking; no exposition.
I say 'oddly' quiet because this is a (sometimes literally) balls-out fight comic, three chapters long with one major fight in each, seeing a nameless, shirtless outer space barbarian antihero damned to the titular wasteland, a vast space beneath the crust of a barren planet, populated by the worst of the worst, where violence is the only law and weird creatures roam free. It's not a parody, as diabolically emphatic as the artist's take on the material can get - nearly every line is either some curt, profane tough guy invitation to pain or an exclamation of agony or surprise, as if Ryan somehow distilled all the badass chest-thumping moments from three months of superhero comics and action manga and used only that stuff for his characterization.
And it works! This super-blunt take on the concept meshes perfectly with Ryan's visual style, which tears out the slickness of Angry Youth's characters to focus on visceral combat action and reaction -- he's switched from brush to pen -- with near-whimsical designs accumulating scratches and gashes and rips and tears until they're nearly in the state of notebook scribbles. No fancy acrobatics here: Ryan's art is less about sweeping movement than studied gesture, close-range impact, guys almost systematically taking each other to pieces across those steady panel beats. Which isn't to say there's no sophistication:
Check out how the first tier keeps Our Man steady, scratched down in panel 1 then punched off guard in panel 2. Then our point of view slowly draws closer in the bottom tier, as if pulling him in from panel 3 to the mass confusion of rips and bites in panel 4. I love the quiet of the latter scratches, the noise of blood left to speak for itself while a tiny "BITE" marks the only action we haven't yet seen.
Other pages are less polite, wrapping characters in so much physical activity the storytelling borders on the surreal. Here's three pages from early on, in which the fighter tangles with a man's living entrails:
By that last page you wonder if the printer didn't get its files mixed up with Abstract Comics: The Anthology. Yet Ryan simply knows to leave nothing off the table in pressing the action, from bodily distortion to old-school manga effects - note the final panel's ultra-rare English usage of Osamu Tezuka's famous "SILENCE" sound effect.
Manga strikes me as crucial to this work. While Ryan has cited contemporary alternative fantasy comics like Powr Mastrs and The Mourning Star (and the works of Benjamin Marra) as influences, he also highlights Kentarō Miura's Berserk, the manic ferocity of which seems a more immediate inspiration. Hell, I was reminded most of Takayuki Yamaguchi's infamously excessive shōnen battle manga Apocalypse Zero, wherein the driven boy hero and his super-suit took on a huge monster woman using human faces as pasties and an old man firing deadly semen darts while swinging his mighty balls.
Prison Pit has the same spirit, a sense of sheer imagination missing from so many North American action comics. You've seen the living guts, but how about a guy with a sub-body popping out when his head gets severed? Or the dude who squirts his chest acne to release a stream of razor-sharp goo capable of taking off a man's arm? Or a naked man that prepares for battle by jerking off and spurting out a bio-organic power suit? By that point the nameless 'hero' is barely more than a mass of ink scrapes, and you half-expect his body to change, if only because Ryan's fascination with bodies coming apart and re-forming seems to demand it as part of the book's ecosystem.
But then, that's another thing. Prison Pit is absolutely obsessed with bodily functions; maybe you'd expect that from Ryan, but its never been blown up to this extent. Where Ryan's jokes often run on piss, shit, farts, cum and puke, his action comic posits an entire world totally ruled by biological function. It's not just guys hitting each other - almost every special attack in this thing is a manifestation of some bodily mechanism, captured so carefully by Ryan's flesh-on-flesh approach to fighting.
And then there's the landscapes, the SILENCE. Among the first images of the book is a none-too-subtle glimpse of a prison spaceship's long elevator shaft probing into a hole in the planetary surface; the pit is thus fertilized with action. At times Ryan's panels veer in to examine ooze dripping from a cactus, critters feasting on goop, little worms slurping up blood; if the pithy conversations of Ryan's characters evokes a Fist of the North Star spin on C.F., his places are sheer Teratoid Heights, with a touch of Jim Woodring's holy-obscure cartoon iconography.
None of this seems out of place. It's a breathing, crapping world, one fluent in multiple comics traditions and wholly appropriate for the gross clashes of Ryan's fighters, deepening everything with no time wasted on explanation. I mean, who the fuck wants to watch people stand around and talk in a fight comic?
This really needs to be experienced on its own. It's rich, clever, energetic, funny - I don't think I've purely in-my-guts enjoyed another comic so much in 2009. It builds and builds on Ryan's body comedy and body horror, into a total body world, action comics as pure function. It's climax dives into what appears to be a straight homage to another popular manga I daren't name, and then pushes it past fighting, past violence and all the way into the realm of goddamned erotic idyll.
Fuck it. You've gotta see it to believe it. That final scene might as well last forever and end the story for good -- it works perfectly -- though the title says there's sequels. I hope there's a dozen.
This is the best comic Johnny Ryan has ever drawn. And I'm the guy that ranked the last Angry Youth Comix in his Best of 2008. It's coming soon from Fantagraphics, a 120-page softcover for $12.99. I'll tell you when it's out, so you can buy it.
Funny thing about Ryan: his reputation as a relentless gross out gag man tends to obscure how versatile his art can be, and how catholic he is with format. He's got his Angry Youth pamphlet comic; his Blecky Yuckarella strip styled like a newspaper daily; comics and illustrations in magazines; limited edition minicomics collected into small books - and all of them are different in how they approach the comedy. Hell, Angry Youth has been pushing itself harder into shock horror-in-comedy-form with every new issue, with corresponding advances in Ryan's control of pace; pit that against the unabashed dirty sketchbook glee of his minicomics, and you can see the ease with which he switches modes while remaining entirely himself.
Well here's the next step: the bookshelf-ready original series. It goes places even longtime readers might not expect.
The first thing you'll notice about Prison Pit is that it's as tightly controlled as recent Angry Youths issues, but much airier; most pages are four-panel grids, with splashes sometimes interrupting to emphasize massive landscapes. It's also oddly quiet - the first 17 pages have just over half a dozen panels with any dialogue at all, and what's there is curt chit-chat and shit-talking; no exposition.
I say 'oddly' quiet because this is a (sometimes literally) balls-out fight comic, three chapters long with one major fight in each, seeing a nameless, shirtless outer space barbarian antihero damned to the titular wasteland, a vast space beneath the crust of a barren planet, populated by the worst of the worst, where violence is the only law and weird creatures roam free. It's not a parody, as diabolically emphatic as the artist's take on the material can get - nearly every line is either some curt, profane tough guy invitation to pain or an exclamation of agony or surprise, as if Ryan somehow distilled all the badass chest-thumping moments from three months of superhero comics and action manga and used only that stuff for his characterization.
And it works! This super-blunt take on the concept meshes perfectly with Ryan's visual style, which tears out the slickness of Angry Youth's characters to focus on visceral combat action and reaction -- he's switched from brush to pen -- with near-whimsical designs accumulating scratches and gashes and rips and tears until they're nearly in the state of notebook scribbles. No fancy acrobatics here: Ryan's art is less about sweeping movement than studied gesture, close-range impact, guys almost systematically taking each other to pieces across those steady panel beats. Which isn't to say there's no sophistication:
Check out how the first tier keeps Our Man steady, scratched down in panel 1 then punched off guard in panel 2. Then our point of view slowly draws closer in the bottom tier, as if pulling him in from panel 3 to the mass confusion of rips and bites in panel 4. I love the quiet of the latter scratches, the noise of blood left to speak for itself while a tiny "BITE" marks the only action we haven't yet seen.
Other pages are less polite, wrapping characters in so much physical activity the storytelling borders on the surreal. Here's three pages from early on, in which the fighter tangles with a man's living entrails:
By that last page you wonder if the printer didn't get its files mixed up with Abstract Comics: The Anthology. Yet Ryan simply knows to leave nothing off the table in pressing the action, from bodily distortion to old-school manga effects - note the final panel's ultra-rare English usage of Osamu Tezuka's famous "SILENCE" sound effect.
Manga strikes me as crucial to this work. While Ryan has cited contemporary alternative fantasy comics like Powr Mastrs and The Mourning Star (and the works of Benjamin Marra) as influences, he also highlights Kentarō Miura's Berserk, the manic ferocity of which seems a more immediate inspiration. Hell, I was reminded most of Takayuki Yamaguchi's infamously excessive shōnen battle manga Apocalypse Zero, wherein the driven boy hero and his super-suit took on a huge monster woman using human faces as pasties and an old man firing deadly semen darts while swinging his mighty balls.
Prison Pit has the same spirit, a sense of sheer imagination missing from so many North American action comics. You've seen the living guts, but how about a guy with a sub-body popping out when his head gets severed? Or the dude who squirts his chest acne to release a stream of razor-sharp goo capable of taking off a man's arm? Or a naked man that prepares for battle by jerking off and spurting out a bio-organic power suit? By that point the nameless 'hero' is barely more than a mass of ink scrapes, and you half-expect his body to change, if only because Ryan's fascination with bodies coming apart and re-forming seems to demand it as part of the book's ecosystem.
But then, that's another thing. Prison Pit is absolutely obsessed with bodily functions; maybe you'd expect that from Ryan, but its never been blown up to this extent. Where Ryan's jokes often run on piss, shit, farts, cum and puke, his action comic posits an entire world totally ruled by biological function. It's not just guys hitting each other - almost every special attack in this thing is a manifestation of some bodily mechanism, captured so carefully by Ryan's flesh-on-flesh approach to fighting.
And then there's the landscapes, the SILENCE. Among the first images of the book is a none-too-subtle glimpse of a prison spaceship's long elevator shaft probing into a hole in the planetary surface; the pit is thus fertilized with action. At times Ryan's panels veer in to examine ooze dripping from a cactus, critters feasting on goop, little worms slurping up blood; if the pithy conversations of Ryan's characters evokes a Fist of the North Star spin on C.F., his places are sheer Teratoid Heights, with a touch of Jim Woodring's holy-obscure cartoon iconography.
None of this seems out of place. It's a breathing, crapping world, one fluent in multiple comics traditions and wholly appropriate for the gross clashes of Ryan's fighters, deepening everything with no time wasted on explanation. I mean, who the fuck wants to watch people stand around and talk in a fight comic?
This really needs to be experienced on its own. It's rich, clever, energetic, funny - I don't think I've purely in-my-guts enjoyed another comic so much in 2009. It builds and builds on Ryan's body comedy and body horror, into a total body world, action comics as pure function. It's climax dives into what appears to be a straight homage to another popular manga I daren't name, and then pushes it past fighting, past violence and all the way into the realm of goddamned erotic idyll.
Fuck it. You've gotta see it to believe it. That final scene might as well last forever and end the story for good -- it works perfectly -- though the title says there's sequels. I hope there's a dozen.
posted by Jog at 11:59 PM
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