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Thursday 30 May 2024

Fat Cop by Johnny Ryan Review


Murder, rape, necrophilia - all in a day’s work for Fatcop. But disaster strikes as Fatcop gets paired with a straight-shootin’ partner - however will he continue his heinous lifestyle? And what’s going on in the basement of Trader Joe’s!?


Johnny Ryan’s back with a new subtle, thoughtful and heart-warming comic in Fatcop. I was initially excited about this one as I loved the premise of an utterly corrupt scumbag cop character, especially as it was Johnny Ryan writing and drawing, so it’s a little disappointing to say that Fatcop was surprisingly boring.

The book is occasionally funny, like when supercop Pete Rick (P. Rick, geddit?) tries to get Fatcop to quit by making him work out until he soils himself, or when Fatcop makes love to a garbage pile. But the book is so consistently and gratuitously over-the-top gross that the unrelenting vulgarity becomes not as funny, until it’s not at all, and more than a little dull.

I would’ve preferred if Ryan had stuck to having Fatcop deal with real world things so I found the supernatural tangents pointless and silly more than anything. The storyline veers off from the supercop partner to what’s under Trader Joe’s and the absurdity goes off a cliff. But it’s just too much by then - you can’t have every other page be a blowjob/mutilation scene and then expect that doing more of that provides any kind of payoff to a story.

It’s imaginative and original at least - Johnny Ryan’s comics never seem derivative of anything, other than his own work - and the jokes sometimes hit. Generally though, Fatcop gets overwhelmed and bogged down in too much gross-out humour to be all that entertaining or satisfying a narrative. Definitely not among Ryan’s better comics.

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