Sick, Twisted and Hilarious
November 7, 2013 by Rudy PanucciThe PopCult Bookshelf
Ray and Joe
The Story of a Man and His Dead Friend
And Other Classic Comics by
Charles Rodrigues
Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 978-1-60699-668-3
$29.99
Reverent collections of gut-bustingly funny comic strips done in extremely poor taste are few and far between, but when the planets align and such a collection presents itself, one can only “ohh” and “ah” over it and treat it as the special treasure that it is. “Ray and Joe: The Story of a Man and His Dead Friend” collects several years worth of comic strips that Charles Rodrigues produced for The National Lampoon from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. They are over-the-top with envelope-pushing bad taste and are characterized by Rodrigues’ deceptively grotesque cartooning and evil plotting.
They are, in short, brilliant. Sick, maybe, but still brilliant.
Take the lead strip in this collection for instance. Ray and Joe ran from 1982 to 1984 in one-page installments in The Lampoon’s “Funny Pages” section. It tells the story of Ray, who would so miss his friend Joe when he dies that he asks Joe’s widow if he can have the body.
This is years before “Weekend at Bernie’s” and it’s way more twisted than Bernie could ever be.
Most of the book is taken up by The Aesop Brothers, Rodrigues’ Siamese brothers who ran in The National Lampoon on and off for more than a decade. He came to hate them, even making a point to kill them off himself in one strip, but he kept reviving them to torture them further.
Sam DeGroot tells the tale of a Private Detective in an iron lung. There are dozens of other strips by Rodrigues that show how he’d take an idea and crash it into a wall just for laughs.
Rodrigues’ art style is hard to describe. His linework is intricate, but it creates the illusion of being slap-dash. He has a scratchy style that hides the level of craftsmanship on display here.
The man was a talented storyteller who perfectly communicated what his characters were doing.
His humor is just balls-out anarchy. Anything sick or twisted can and will happen. When the blind man who takes in Diedre Callahan feels her face for the first time while in the hospital–sitting on a bedpan–his stool turns to stone. Sam DeGroot gets captured by a cannibal who wants to use his iron lung as a pressure cooker to roast Sam.
“Ray and Joe” is a long-overdue collection of Charles Rodrigues’ work. This may be the archival comics collection most likely to induce stomach pain this year. It’s that funny.