What happens when you put Mad Magazine on steroids and throw it straight into a radioactive sewer where it has to fight off alligators with a$$ fixations? Something very much like Explode #1, a filthy, filthy little anthology-format book by Dean LeCrone, the creator of Tacklebear and Barko the Stickdog. LeCrone is obviously a fan of Michael Kupperman’s style of non-sequitorial humor, but where Kupperman just gets weird, LeCrone just gets vulgar. It’s an interesting read, because you’re kind of in disbelief. It’s like what the janitor woman in The World According To Garp says to the publisher about Garp’s “X-rated soap opera”: no matter how twisted and f***ed-up the book got, she just kept reading because she couldn’t believe that it could get any worse.
Which is definitely where my head went reading Explode #1. LeCrone starts us with a story about a boy wanting a cookie, the father saying no, and the boy being very insistent. Sounds almost wholesome, right? Well, take another look, because Junior, a big believer in following through with threats, takes a dump on the kitchen floor. Yep – the first panel of page 2 features fecal matter exiting a young man’s poop chute.
And it only goes downhill from there. Junior and Dad fend off killer squads of stuffed animals and power tools, only to mutate from gamma ray juice into ginormous freaks battling in space until Dad is hurled into the sun, eaten as a cookie substitute, and then pooped out the next day.
“Oh boy,” I thought to myself, “what the f*** else is coming?”
Well, lessee – a ugly woman replaces her hideous face with her gorgeous a$$; a talking pimple who looks and acts like a Troma character on acid; Insane Joe and his many, many, many misadventures in life; the story of Hanson (can’t get stranger than that); and the pregnancy of a 63-year-old woman. All of them stretched out in the the most vulgar fashion possible. Crude, crude, crude. Nothing subtle about this humor. “My dog Dick is so limp! He’s dead!” Yeah – crude crude crude.
Fortunately, the humor works. As cringeworthy as the book was, I found myself chuckling more often than not. LeCrone’s shtick to stretch out his disgusting gags far beyond stupid into strange straight through uncomfortable into just plain absurd. And it’s at that point when it works. It’s not the strategy of “If an ounce of crap works, a pound must be better.” No, it’s more like a metric a$$load must be better, and then throw on some chopped nuts, maraschino cherries, and more fecal matter for good measure. LeCrone’s Mad Magazine drawing style works well for this disgustingly vile pamphlet stinking up my collection of minibooks – in fact, anything else would simply feel pretentious and derivative.
