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Vice Blog

LITERARY - THE KOLLECTED KKK

The Klassic Komix Klub
Johnny Ryan
Buenaventura Press

If you're wondering what spurred us off our ass and into finally posting Johnny Ryan's one-panel gag reels from the back of the magazine, it was the arrival of this handsomely bound volume. For those of you who frequent Johnny's website, this is the definitive, hardcover collection of all the literary adaptions he's been doing there over the past year, with some 20 new comics and one of those classy cloth bookmarks that's attached to the spine thrown in for good measure. Then again, considering the sort of folks who know what we're talking about here have probably already bought their own copy of the book, what's the point in even addressing them in this review? For the rest of you, Johnny Ryan is an ornery man from Los Angeles who draws some of the funniest comics of all time.

In the Klassic Komix Klub series, he digests the great works of world literature, like Heart of Darkness and Ulysses, into one-page comics in similar fashion to those "Children's Classics" from the 60s, except he remembers to include all the tit-fucking, gallons of cum, shit-tit-fucking, and anthropomorphic queefs that accidentally got left out of the originals. Also, as a result of the little-known fact that Johnny was an English major in college and remains a closeted book dork, all the comics are fairly accurate to the source material. Even when one of the Yahoos from Gulliver's Travels shits out a nerd and tells Gulliver "You better get used to it, faggot," you can rest assured it's fully in keeping with the thematic spirit of Swift's satirical masterpiece. Seriously.

Despite it saying "April 2007" on their website, Buenaventura just put out The Klassic Komix Klub last month. You can buy the sucker here.