New Character Parade also by Johnny Ryan
A case of Miller High Life
"Tastebuds" by King Khan and BBQ Show (along with everything they've ever recorded)
Used to be, the only time I ever read Johnny Ryan was in the back of a Vice magazine while sitting on the toilet taking a shit, and I pretty much thought that was the perfect way to enjoy him. Turns out, as good as that was, there's an even better way!
I'd say I became an actual Johnny Ryan fan with his Prison Pit series (currently in 2 feces and jizz-soaked volumes). Prison Pit features a wrestler-alien-degenerate musclehead character who is deposited in a prison underworld and proceeds to beat, murder and fuck his way through an assortment of hilarious creatures who want nothing more than to beat, murder and fuck him right back. Prison Pit (and basically everything Ryan has ever drawn) feels like the notebook doodlings of a stoner metal-head kid who is failing his easiest class (Communications) in a Michigan high school in 1981, only expanded and pushed to conclusions that are way beyond any burnouts limited attention span. It takes about 10 minutes to read each volume of Prison Pit, so about 2 beers and half a High On Fire record to put it in Comic Book Castle time. When you're done you're left with laugh-tears in your eyes and a hankering to crack another beer and start all over again.
Prions Pit is wicked, but I'm here to talk about Ryan's latest 2 abominations, the newest volume of his Comic Book Holocaust series and New Character Parade, a very similar collection of 12-panel strips devoted to exploring issues of race, sexual politics, culture and the human condition. Well more like racial jokes, rape jokes, calling other famous cartoonists faggots (graphic novelists, excuse me) , and lots and lots of poop. From one page to the next, your eyes will be assaulted with images of people skating on turds, women getting off on chainsaw blades, dudes raping pulverized corpses and the Sub-Mariner forcing a man to fuck an octopus at gunpoint. And you will love every minute of it.
As I tore through these hillarious pages, I listened to 2 albums by Canadian treasures, King Khan and BBQ Show, a fuzzy-as-fuck garage rock duo (sadly no more) that I never get tired of and that I knew would go perfectly with Ryan's loose and informal scribblings of dicks and sloppy pussies. Specifically, the song "Tastebuds" when playing behind some of the more perverted strips in these books practically transported me to the fuck rooms of ancient Rome, only filled with poo-covered half-wits rubbing themselves. "Tastebuds" imagines the possibilites of having olfactory senses in our genitals. Here's the chorus, which gets repeated like 10 times and will stick in your brains forever:
Tastebuds on my cock
Let me love you baby around the clock
Tastebuds on your cunt
So you can lick my booty from the front
Tastebuds on your shit
So you can taste a nugget on my prick
Tastebuds on my nuts
So I can taste up inside your butt
Okay, you've got 2 Johnny Ryan books with over a 100 pages of Persistent Juvenitis, you've got King Khan and BBQ rocking the fucking out, but what kind of beer do you drink with that? Well, any of course, but I wouldn't waste a nice hoppy IPA that costs 14 bucks a case on a night of dick and shit and dicks-dipped-in-shit jokes. Miller High Life, with it's unchallenging flavour and general lack of character or imagination is the perfect, light, easy-chugging beer to pair with the above. When I was in highschool, we used to drink it simply because it was called High Life, and we were always high and the name alone would make us giggle. In fact now that I think of it, I would also recommend smoking a joint while reading Comic Book Holocaust and New Character Parade. Occasionally dope can fuck up a good comic reading session, clouding your thoughts and shorting out the wires in your brain that are needed to process the unique storytelling structure. A comic by someone like Grant Morrisson or Warren Ellis can be totally ruined by getting high, making it impossible to follow their mind-fuckery. But with Johnny Ryan, I'd say a joint wouldn't hurt a bit. People have been laughing at shit and genitalia since the caveman days and a little THC isn't going to get in the way of that most primal of entertainments.
Here's Tastebuds:
07 Tastebuds by dannyonions
You're welcome.
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