COVID strikes so the gang all move into Megg, Mogg and Owl’s place to weather out the pandemic - with hi-larious consequences! Who’ll get the ‘vid? How will the deadbeats make money? What happens when they run out of weed? It’s all kicking off in Crisis Zone!
Simon Hanselmann delayed the follow-up to Bad Gateway, Megg’s Coven, once the pandemic hit and decided to do a webcomic instead, posting the strips daily to Instagram, all of which are collected here (with a lot of extras - the gram only allows a maximum of 10 panels per upload and most of the pages here are 12 panel grids). Crisis Zone is heavily influenced by the daily bonkers happenings of 2020 and it feels very reactionary and thrown together.
Not that this is a bad book - I don’t think Hanselmann can make one of those - but it does feel overstuffed with silliness and unstructured and haphazard in a way that makes it easy to put down and quite wearying to read.
There’s too much Werewolf Jones keraziness. Some of it is sorta funny like the Sodomy Squad part, where the gang venture out into the hellscape world to rescue one of Jones’ disgusting boys, and some of it is elongated tedium like the Netflix Tiger King parody Anus King (it’s Werewolf Jones so nearly all the material is butt-related stuff).
The Ass Blaster skit is really funny but there’s so much unhinged Jones material that I ended up siding with perennial straight-man Owl and hating Jones. He’s a brilliant side character but he becomes tedious when given centre stage. Oh look, he’s doing more drugs and more butt stuff. Again. And again.
The book overall isn’t that interesting but there are lots of little moments that are really great. Like when Owl loses his job and decides to “break bad” by pimping out Jones, so he puts on his “Heisenberg hat”, and when Jennifer (Mike the Wizard transitions) sings Queen’s I Want To Break Free. A lot of the running jokes are brilliant too like Ian the Bear constantly getting shot even though he’s a bystander, the numerous thong funerals, Mogg being called Carrot Bottom, and the whole David Choe thing.
And parts of the narrative are compelling like Mogg’s journey in the COVID world after he breaks up with Megg, and Owl’s arc in becoming the legal guardian of Jones’ kids - Owl really shines in this book, becoming much more than the punching bag he usually is (though he’s still kind of a tool). There’s just a lot of disjointed stuff mixed in too that’s not really very interesting - the whole Dracula Jr Jr thing, Jones’ horrible wife Susan returning, and seeing all the stuff from 2020 again (Animal Crossing addiction, toilet paper/grocery shortages, working from home, etc.).
It does end on an interesting note that might signal the impending end of the series after Megg’s Coven (unless the character’s death is redacted, kinda like other characters’ “deaths” in this book). And I’m blown away as I always am at how insanely productive Hanselmann is - he manages to write, draw and colour an entire book (this is 286 pages, 12 panels a page!) every year, which are almost always amazing in quality too. It’s incredible.
There’s also 12 pages of Hanselmann’s commentary included at the back to explain the numerous references throughout which might be of interest to future readers who didn’t live through 2020, but I didn’t need to read that as I got nearly everything that was referenced. Especially given that this is an oversized paperback and the text is tiny, so the 12 pages is a very dense and cumbersome add-on to wade through at the end. Does anyone need to read a summary of the book they just read right after they finish it?
Crisis Zone is a mixed bag of semi-interesting skits and storylines and a lot of other stuff that’s kinda boring. The last couple Megg and Mogg books were genuinely unputdownable so I was surprised that I actually had to force myself to get to the end of this one as I really wasn’t into it. I think Crisis Zone was made up as Hanselmann went along and it shows. It’s one of the weakest books in the series so far but hopefully Megg’s Coven will be worth the wait.
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