I’ve been going back to Nathan Ward’s Warpwish Comix #1 (I checked, and no matter how the logo may appear to you, that is the cartoonist’s preferred spelling of the title) every week of two since he self-published it in magazine format (on old-school newsprint no less, hooray for that!) at the tail end of 2016, trying my level best to decipher it. To plumb its depths or, failing that, to at least limn the boundaries of its hermetically-sealed internal — well, not logic, but maybe ethos. To figure out both what was happening in it and why. Spoiler alert — it hasn’t been easy.  And I’m pretty sure I’ve failed on all counts.

Indeed, all I can really be certain of, even after all this time, is that just because Ward is from Cleveland (where he’s been active in a number of punk bands over the…

It’s all been leading up to this : four years in the making, the sixth and final installment of Johnny Ryan’s formerly-annual (or thereabouts) paean to thoughtless juvenalia, Prison Pit, is upon us courtesy of Fantagraphics Books, and while it’s frankly impossible to conceive of anyone feeling in any way “attached” to protagonist Cannibal Fuckface, much less to the batshit crazy universe he calls home, it’s equally been impossible to conceive of any of the gleefully depraved hyper-violence, horrifyingly sick sex, and/or both that have appeared on pretty much every page of this series since his inception — impossible for anyone but Ryan, mind you.

Which is, of course, precisely how it should be. Ryan boxed himself into a corner with this project from the outset, it seems to me — he literally had no choice but to consistently “one-up” himself, otherwise what the fuck was the point? —…