Aboard a prison spaceship, a prisoner is thrown into a pit (that’s basically a portal to another world) and must survive in a harsh landscape filled with killers. Insane amounts of gore and violence ensue!
Johnny Ryan’s comics are very, very crass - gloriously so! - with Prison Pit being perhaps the epitome of his style. It’s extremely gross in content and childish in tone but also undeniably imaginative, often compelling and totally unique.
I’ll give you an idea of what to expect: the chapters have titles like Fucked, Mega-Fucked and The Unfuckening; the storylines involve such noble quests as raping a monster and getting drugs; the characters have names like Fuckface, Undigestible Scrotum and The Holocaust Brothers; and the dialogue has Shakespearean-esque nuggets like “I’m gonna split you in half and wear your lungs as underpants” and “If you want it, you’ll have to rip it out of my cold, dead crotch slime.”
Delightful, no?
The storyline is basically the protagonist Fuckface horrifically killing one group of scumbags after another, which sounds mind-numbingly stupid and boring - but it’s not. Ryan draws it all in such creative ways that the repetitiveness remains surprisingly fresh throughout. One character masturbates until he has enough jizz to surround himself with it and it becomes a sentient monster-armour; one of the ships is powered by having sex with it; one character relaxes by having catjaculate pumped straight to his veins. It’s sheer lunacy but you can’t call it derivative!
Ryan put out this series in six volumes from 2009 to 2018 and I remember reading the first three books years ago and really enjoying them. No idea why I stopped but when I saw this book, which collects all six volumes, I had to check it out and I was pleasantly surprised to see it still holds up.
It does go on a bit too long, which is really noticeable in this collected edition, but even at 736 pages, it’s a fast read - Ryan does not do lengthy dialogue and much of the book is a constant stream of wordless, demented fighting. It is also a bit one-note after a spell, regardless of the clever ways Ryan has Fuckface kill his foes, and the story is about as deep as a puddle so I was ready for the book to end long before it did. It has a great ending though - very fitting for such a psychotic narrative!
Johnny Ryan’s schoolboy-ish humour isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I think the guy is brilliant and makes some fantastic comics - he’s a true original. The series might’ve gone on for too long but there’s plenty of great stuff in here to make reading the whole wonderful mess an entertaining experience - so long as you’re not squeamish and don’t mind the silliness of it all. If you ever wanted to read a Jim Woodring comic written by Beavis and Butt-Head, check out Prison Pit!
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