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Written by Byron Kerman Thursday, 08 March 2007 16:00

 

Think you've got a sick enough sense of humor to endure Boobs Pooter's Jokepocalypse and the terrifying toilet humor of Blecky Yuckarella? Then try this pair of books from gross-out artist extraordinaire Johnny Ryan on for size.

 

 

Angry Youth Comics #12 featuring Boobs Pooter's Jokepocalypse (Fantagraphics)

24 pgs.B&W; $3.50 SC

(W / A: Johnny Ryan)

 

Back in Bleck: Blecky Yuckarella Vol. 2 (Fantagraphics)

104 pgs. B&W; $11.95 SC

(W / A: Johnny Ryan)

 

Boobs Pooter is a wacky vaudevillian who entertains with his wordplay, ready smile and good-natured family comedy. He also owns a slave plantation that grows Swastika-shaped bananas. On occasion he has been known to turn the corpse of a Klansman into a flying machine that runs on "White Power." And once, he made a bloody mess in the Oval Office of the White House. It's okay, though -- he cleaned it all up with a rag. A rag called the U.S. Constitution.

 

Johnny Ryan, creator of Angry Youth Comics, is all about out-offending and out-grossing any and all comers. Sometimes it's hilarious. Take the talking blobs of breast cancer that star in the long-running comedy "Breast Cancer Odd Couple." Please. When Pooter blows up President Lincoln (by pumping gasoline into one of his orifices and lighting him up), the explosion makes a resounding "Abrablam!"

 

Nothing is off limits. It's the kind of guilty humor you're afraid to show anyone else, even as you're laughing out loud at yet another Holocaust or September 11 gag. "Jokepocalypse," indeed.

 

Ryan has a pretty wide audience, thanks to his four-panel strip Blecky Yuckerella, syndicated in a few alternative papers. (He has also seen his comics printed in both Hustler and Nickelodeon magazines, a feat worth noting.) Blecky is an extraordinarily ugly and dirty young lass who sickens all within her bailiwick. Sometimes her misadventures are funny, as when she encounters a transsexual "haunted by the ghost of his balls." Other times, Ryan's gleeful attempt to win a gross-out contest is just that. (Head to http://www.johnnyr.com/ for a new Blecky strip weekly.)

 

The Blecky compilation Back in Bleck -- and everything else by Ryan -- can rest comfortably next to Ivan Brunetti's uber-profane Haw or anything by gutter-comedian Kaz. If G.G. Allin and John Belushi were reaching for the same book in a Borders in Hell, it would probably be something by Johnny Ryan. | Byron Kerman