So, here's the deal:
If you're the kind of person who's repulsed by depictions of urine, feces, rape, incest, murder (whether by handgun, saber, dagger, or arrow), decapitation, suicide, homophobia, misogyny, racism, or self-mutilation, all served up with unrelenting nihilism, then you may as well stop reading this review right now. Seriously. Avert thine eyes. Turn the page. Do the crossword.
If, however, you're the sort who busts a gut over someone getting his tally-whacker hacked off, well, you've been given a dose of pictorial laughing gas. It goes by the name Misery Loves Comedy. And your anesthesiologist? Call him Ivan Brunetti.
To some people -- the comic loving freaks in the room -- illustrator Brunetti is a god. (And that's with a lower-case "g," because if it were the Upper-case fella, Brunetti would, and does, show him having intercourse with the Baby Jesus -- who happens to look like Swee'Pea, of Popeye fame -- before shooting up heroin.) And even if you don't get your groove on via comics, you may still have seen his work in The New Yorker, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Mother Jones, and just about everywhere else. But rest assured: most of Misery's crude graphics would never make it past the editors of those publications.
By now, those still reading may be thinking: "Come on. How rude could they be?" Well...
On Page One, Brunetti draws himself gouging out some guy's eyes with his thumbs. Two panels later, he's licking off the bloody vitreous humor. Then he urinates on the corpse in the fourth panel. The comic Brunetti worries he could get in trouble for the act, only to reassure himself that won't happen: "Luckily, the absence of any supreme being in this pitiless abattoir of a universe will eliminate the possibility of cosmic retribution for any human wrongdoing. Ha ha ha!" And the wrongdoings keep right on coming.
In the four-panel comic, "Aborted Fetus with a Badass Attitude," our titular character walks into a bar, ordering a double scotch on the rocks. When another patron makes a crack about the fetus' lack of genitals, the fetus asphyxiates him. Another simple, one-panel drawing shows a morgue attendant having sex with a smiling cadaver, with the caption: "Ha! Fooled ya... I'm still alive!" And in "Someone Gave the Cat PCP," a drug-addled feline, claws razor sharp, goes postal on a man's penis...
Laughing yet?
Much of this "zany madcap degenerate filth" originally appeared in "Schizo," a comic, as illustrated by Brunetti, where you're guaranteed two things: first, a narrator whose sense of self-loathing seems, at the risk of getting all hyperbolic, unmatched in just about any other artist and his attendant medium. No one is as miserable as Brunetti, or as consumed with sex, rage, and angst. No one. Except for the rest of world's denizens he draws, who are just as pathetic, if not worse.
Second is a gallery of amazing illustrations. Honestly. They're flat-out incredible. Whether black-n-white, or color, they practically hypnotize. And his range. He can start with (sur)realism, veer into cubism, tiptoe through impressionism, and land in flat-out caricature. He's a comic-book blend of Bosch, Van Gogh, Goya, and Lichtenstein on a bad acid trip. A really bad trip.
If the illustrations themselves don't provide enough of a window into a tortured mind, then check out the book's intro, penned by Brunetti's therapist. She notes that, even though drawing cartoons is his life, her patient finds the act completely frightening: only the fear of his editors' rage at his missing a deadline trumps the shame he feels that the public will reject his work. In their sessions, they tackle the rage he felt for his father that, unexpressed, he directs toward himself, spilling over as creations on the page. To readers of his books, she offers this advice: "Enjoy the cartoons. Don't get too impatient waiting for the next book. Treat your children well."
On some level, it seems clear that art saved Brunetti's life. For when a man suffers such dread, surely it's best for all involved that he safely express it. Add talent on top of that, and you've got a body of work -- no matter how disturbing -- that's nothing short of remarkable. And some of it is funny. Even hilarious.
Of course, you may not want to go there. You may have no desire to witness Brunetti draw a murderous fantasy where he rapes a co-worker he loathes, slices off his head with a scimitar, then punts it over a goalpost. "I've got 'issues,'" a repentant comic-Brunetti declares a few frames later. You said it, pal.
But perhaps it's better to draw your issues out rather than act them out. Who knows. Maybe if George Bush would've worked out his daddy's issues with Saddam Hussein through doodles, we wouldn't be in Iraq. Though I doubt W. can draw as well as Brunetti or match his dark comic irony. In fact, I'm sure of it.