I’m having a damn tough time deciding whether or not the actual contents of Chicago-based cartoonist Cooper Whittlesey’s self-published Scat Hog Volume One are as incendiary as the title would suggest. On the one hand, yeah, this comic most certainly dwells on the more repugnant biological realities of human existence, but only insofar as they’re magnified and reflected in the less-than-grander tapestry of the cultural zeitgeist writ large — in other words, all is scat and all is hog and if you’re in the market for the “fee-good” reading, this ain’t it.

What it is, however, is scathingly — dare I say scatologically — funny more of then than not, and even when it isn’t the deep thread of absurdism that runs through and indeed underpins everything on offer is still more than present, yet paradoxically less than oppressive. Whittlesey has a definite point of view, one grounded in…