BOOK / J. RYAN - Pudridero 2

Illustrated, Graphic Novel

You buy the rights to this thing, translate the four bits of nonsense it says, wrap it up as if it were fine contemporary art, they buy it, they don't get mad, they put you up in the clouds. There you've been. -A friend

If humor = tragedy + time, Ryan tries to shorten the deadlines as much as possible. -Julio Soria Doze magazine

Reading Pudridero, one feels to what extent the joy of reading a comic book has to do with contemplating an infinite succession of cause and effect relationships. -Sammy Harkham

Another lethal and relentless offspring has arrived on the planet of deformity and excrement, and it's looking for the Carantigua: Pudridero is not big enough for the both of them, my friend. Unaware of the appearance of his pursuer, the protagonist of the saga will employ his expeditious methods to escape the clutches of the Calígulon, a kind of biomechanical creature trying to control his mind... as if there were anything more in Carantigua's mind than a thirst for blood. The orgy of bodily fluids reaches levels of surgical treatise, tension mounts, and a plot begins to emerge.

If in the first part of Pudridero, we witnessed an hallucinated spectacle of senseless violence and bad taste, Johnny Ryan (Boston, 1970) takes on the famous cinematic precept of starting with an earthquake and then raising the stakes from there. The iconoclastic Ryan revisits the 70s underground and B-movies and returns them to the realm of modernity, stripping them of postmodern irony and placing them where they belong: in the realm of demolition, abyssal and obscene entertainment, bordering on the intolerable.

To date, both in his home country and in Spain, we have seen numerous interpretations about Ryan's conscious or unconscious intentions in creating this monstrosity. In an excellent article, Pepo Pérez recalled Susan Sontag's words: "Ideally, interpreters can be circumvented by another route: by creating works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so great, whose message is so direct, that the work can be... what it is." It's hard to know if Ryan intended to achieve something like this, but it's not a bad idea to recall his own words on the subject: "I wanted to make a comic where big men, ugly monsters, beat each other to a pulp (...) the kind of action or adventure comic you might find if you opened a fourteen-year-old kid's old notebook." Don't swear to it, Johnny.

Title: Pudridero 2 Author: Johnny Ryan Publisher: Fulgencio Pimentel Co-published with Entrecómics Cómics. Binding: Hardcover Format: 17 x 24 cm Number of pages: 240 Number of images: ND Weight: ND Genre: Graphic Novel Language: Spanish Printing: Black and white Year of publication: 2013 Printed in Spain