Johnny Ryan's transgressive masterpiece Prison Pit has been the talk
of alt-comics circles for the past year since its debut in the summer of
2009. But before Prison Pit, Ryan garnered a considerable following
via his one-man humor anthology (which doubled as a one-man War Against
Political Correctness) Angry Youth Comix. Take a Joke collects many
of the best stories from this inimitable series as well as many strips
created for the wildly-popular Vice magazine, to which Ryan has
contributed for years.
Unlike Ryan's previous collections, which focused on very short stories,
Take a Joke spotlights several of the artist's longest humor pieces to
date, notably: "Graveyard Goofs," in which Ryan's hapless antiheroes
Sinus O'Gynus and Loady McGee exhume the corpse of the recently-deceased
Santa Claus as part of a Top Secret experiment, fantasize an orgy with a
collection of anthropomorphic condiment bottles (resulting in an
unwanted pregnancy), and end up in Hell; "Boobs Pooter's Jokepocalypse,"
starring a coprophiliac version of Godzilla who destroys the world with
hilarious jokes and crazy pranks; and "The World's Funniest Joke," a
24-page masterpiece that makes The Aristocrats look like a Nora Ephron
film.
All this plus Cheeseburger Chase, Omletta DuPont, and "The Day The New
Yorker Came to Town"!