Prison Pit

Prison Pit: The Complete Collection
By Johnny Ryan
[Fantagraphics]

Welcome to the wasteland, fuck face.

It’s a barren scape conveniently filled with grievous characters that pop into foul play. Vignettes of a knee pad crusader tearing ass through the pit and pissing on the remains. The violence is uncanny, like visions of a road raged pencil pusher on acid. There are gallons upon gallons of blood pumping out ass rats and slorges. Fluids ranging in mucous degrees flood wasteland, dried out in an instant under the beat sun. Nazi punks fucking off while a twerp pleasures himself into a jizz monster.

An allegory for the depravity of our youth? Of course not! It is mindless speed freaking drivel, the finest of the sort. You don’t need to think about the bigger picture, it’s got pictures. Pictures of marauders throwing up acid and mulleted fiends sprouting tormented cretins from their severed necks. Screeching vulture women with escape snatches and cyborgs behind a chrome motherboard. A diamond encrusted apocalypse brought on by the fellowship of nonagonal octopi. The black & white of the pages begins to will unto a color scheme of mostly red, and it was all done by the ridges of your beautiful slimy brain. Everything is what it is and more. Nothing dies for long because suffering is immortal and imminent.

The reality of this wasteland is streamed from the consciousness of a man possessed by a middle schooler stuck in detention for calling the teacher an asshat or something. They scrawl prophecies on desk and cubicle like men gone mad. It flows like “and then,” but the product is so overkill and metal that Motörhead and Adult Swim would be proud. The book comes with a subconscious soundtrack that plays in the back of your head while you read it. It’s an instrumental of driving drums and pulverized bass. The guitar pulsates repeatedly and your head aches for more beauty. And it is beautiful, because sometimes you just need to have these scenarios played out so you don’t have to act on them yourself. It’s what death metal is to graphic novels. You sit down and you read it and you think about ripping people’s faces off on bath salts. You scream the book into a pillow, then you go about a lovely day anyways. Every slur and egregious monstrosity commutable is laid out in this complete collection of corny chaos. Once you’ve seen it all you can fully know the potential of mankind. A mankind that is really into destruction right now. You need Prison Pit now more than ever. It’ll keep you off the streets and in the gutters.

This book should be taught in schools by a combover janitor of lunacy. It should be distributed to every house on the block by robots in drag. It is the execution of our violent will. Johnny Ryan is your executor. You will die in a fire. A blaze of glory. Then you will reanimate as a charred substance and reap the whirlwind! Join the cult nobody can talk about because they all put their heads in microwaves. It’s prison pit, and it’s going to destroy the world and eat the sandwich that clearly had your name on it in the break room.