Johnny Ryan

A friend of mine recently turned me on (hehe) to a cartoonist named Johnny Ryan, creator of the Angry Youth Comix and Blecky Yuckerella series put out by Seattle-based, alternative comic publisher, Fantagraphics Books. I started my post with the particular comic seen above because I feel like it is a fair representation of his work: crudely drawn, crude in general, always offensive, frequently scatological, obscene, racist (and, in any comic that features a woman, quite sexist). And that's the point. The cartoonist equivalent of a shock-jock, his body of work is united by a singular vision: to be as politically incorrect as possible, to force a confrontation with that which we'd rather not talk about. Here's a picture of the maestro himself, which offers a window into (the sick, twisted and provocative) mind of the creator:

It's in this urge to provoke that I find common ground with Ryan. I think that truth emerges through balanced discourse and I find most proponents of political correctness self-righteous almost to the point of absurdity. In their fervor, they make mockeries of themselves, just like his work, in it's general irreverence, makes a mockery of the issues that they so (pseudo-)sanctimoniously maintain to be untouchable. His comics are intended to shock, to draw out scandalized reactions from the reader, to make old ladies faint. In that way, Ryan's work help brings a sense of balance to the spectrum of political correctness by firmly anchoring the extreme contrarian arguments against the concept in the shit filled waters of dumb blonde/racist/dead baby jokes (in a way that people who make those jokes without a sense of irony could never do). In that sense, he opens open new channels of discourse through edgy provocation, by not just saying what no cultured individual with any sense of propriety would ever dare to say, but by illustrating such superficially horrendous sentiments in such a child-like fashion! 

He is not for everyone, but I  for one commiserate with the vitriolic undercurrents that permeate the majority his work. He unabashedly spits in the face of the socially accepted, hypocritically "polite" social discourse so prevalent today, the well-worn political vagueries and go to platitudes used so readily by so many. His work is the discoursal equivalent of pulling up the rug after years of (willingly) sweeping that which we'd rather not talk about (openly) under it.