Blecky Yuckerella
The line of bad boys in independent comics stretches back from Tony Millionaire (Maakies), Peter Bagge (hate), and Rick Altergott (Doofus) to sixties undergrounders S. Clay Wilson and, heck, R. Crumb himself. Ryan may be the most upsetting of them all, certainly in hisAngry Youth Comix, which brings its mixture of scatology, sex, and billingsgate to an acme of noxious hilarity or, for some, nausea. The four-panelBlecky Yuckerellastrips are as gross but, with kid protagonists, not as sexual or foul-mouthed. The body and its, uh, products constitute the primary font of all humor here, even in the relatively tranquil, subtle, downtime strip, "The Graveyard of Hilarious Cliches," for the last of those moribund apothegms is "Clean-up on aisle three!" Occasionally, garden-variety perverseness generates a punch line, as when Blecky, a Shirley Temple-like little girl--with whiskers and trailing flies!--explains that the sight of "a pathetic loser having a really crappy life" compels her to "make his life even crappier!" The strip's humor usually has to do more with crap than with perverseness.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved