Johnny Ryan’s comics will most certainly offend you – before you start laughing despite yourself. His Angry Youth Comix takes extreme behavior to such absurd levels that it’s simultaneously shocking and silly. His main character, Loady McGee, is an acne-riddled bully who does not hesitate to do whatever he feels like. And, to put it mildly, this results in very un-P.C. activities that can’t even be described here and often devolve into surreal explorations of dark places. We asked the seemingly mild-mannered artist about his “crude, retarded, slapstick” sense of humor and how it makes its way onto paper.
What comics did you read growing up?
I read a lot of comics growing up. Of course, whatever was in the Sunday funnies I would read, except for Doonesbury – hated Doonesbury. Still to this day, any kind of political comics doesn’t interest me very much. And, of course, I was a big Marvel nut as a kid – any piece of crap that Marvel would put out. This was back in the ‘80s, too, and that was like the golden age of garbage for Marvel. I remember U.S. 1, in particular, was a comic about trucking; Team America was their motocross comic; Micronauts; and the New Universe. When they tried to start doing that, I would get all the number-ones of those thinking, “This is a collector’s dream!” They would come out with so many number ones of things, because there was that whole collector boom, and now it’s all worth crap. But I should mention MAD Magazine, too – I would read that all the time, I had a subscription to that.
Had you been drawing this whole time?
As a kid, it was something I was good at. I was a pretty proficient little cartoonist; I would copy all my favorite Marvel characters and whatnot. In college, too, I was an art major for a period of time, but I wasn’t doing this art major because I wanted to go into comics – I was actually thinking seriously about doing serious art, not stupid comic art. Thinking back, I do wish I had drawn a lot more than I did, I wish I had applied myself more in that direction. I think I sort of lost my way a little bit. My parents were sort of, “Art’s nice, as a hobby, but you have to do something serious.” So I think somewhere in my mind I was thinking, “This isn’t something real people do – this is just some sort of weird fantasy thing.” It wasn’t until years later that I was thinking that this was what I always wanted to do – I really enjoyed doing it, so I should just do it. So there were gaps of doing nothing, and I think it shows in my work.
What inspired your first comics?
There were periods of time through college that instead of writing letters to friends, I would draw little comic strips starring them, and they would have horrible things happen to them. I was producing those on a regular basis, but it wasn’t until I got out of college that I started to develop the characters I use today. I would just send them off to friends, these little three-page adventures, one of which I put in the back of my Portajohnny book, the first collection of my comics that Fantagraphics published. I would send it to one friend, then another friend would be like, “Hey, I want to see some of that,” so I started Xeroxing them and mailing them out.
Also, when I got out of college, I didn’t really have any intention of being a comic artist – I majored in English and I wanted to be a serious novelist. I wanted to be like William Faulkner or something, so when I got out of college I was seriously applying myself. I mean, I would wake up in the morning and I would write like really hardcore, modernist fiction all night long, and it was a real chore. I really wasn’t having a lot of fun with that, but I felt like I had to do this for some reason. But at the same time, I was still doing these letters; they were more wacky and retarded, and people would see my letters and they would see my writing, and they would say, “You need to focus more on this funny stuff – that’s what you’re good at.” So at that point I kind of abandoned the Faulkner dreams and focused more the illustration and comic stuff.
Eventually, I sent my stuff out to Peter Bagge. It was about ’99 and at that point he had stopped doing Hate Comics. But he immediately wrote me back just a few days later, and he was really excited about my stuff. I think it was because of the fact I was doing retarded humor comics, something that now in this age of alternative comics is extremely rare. Peter introduced my stuff to my editor, Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics, and really pushed for me to get published. He’s pretty much the reason why I got published. It’s also funny because at that point I had never read Hate in my life so it had no influence on my work, and he was sort of offended by that.
