1995 was a good year to be a 9 year-old. Life was fast, money flowed like wine, and the world was generally a brighter place. Your value was based on what you owned, and everyone just wanted a million dollars. Sounds shallow by today's standards, but fuck you, that's the way it should be. I wish having a mansion and an expensive car is all I need to be happy now, but it's hard to really give a shit anymore. The best part of the early 90s was undeniably Ren and Stimpy, even after its John K-less downfall. Still the highest bar of art, intelligent comedy, transcendental study, and voice-acting, I devour anything related to this amazing achievement in entertainment. Although my appreciation and love of the TV show has only grown over the past 19 years, the non-TV R&S products have been under a lot more scrutiny by me. Most of the games suck, which is completely understandable given the general poor quality of SNES/Genesis cartoon-to-videogame conversions. When I was a kid I adored the comics, and I still find them overall to be decent translations of the show. I just read one of the "Special" comics, Radio Daze, a companion to the CD/CS of the same name, it came out between issues #36 and #37. Yeah, so it was 1995 and John K was long gone at this point, but he never really had a big impact on the comics anyway, but in spirit you know something is missing. The CD and comic follow the same plot pretty much note for note, and should probably be absorbed one right after the next, but I'm gonna focus on the comic. The CD is decent, Ren and Stimpy are historically known for incredible soundtrack selection, but this is entirely original and therefore not of the same standard of quality. Yeah, so what makes or breaks the comic is how well it copies the show and makes you feel like your reading a R&S script with pictures. Mmm let's compare this to the Futurama comics. The Futurama comics go far out of their way to make each character behave just as on the show, although in the earlier comics they watered down the jokes a LOT to be more kid-friendly, but all the plotlines fucking sucked ass and they made each comic feel like a fucking "special" instead of a regular episode. R&S sticks to its guns a bit better, though I guess it's easier considering the transcendental nature of the TV show. The artwork is a bit different than the show. For one thing, it is good, but obviously not of the same caliber as the show. The backgrounds fucking suck, jesus christ they are so fucking bad. Even the abstracted backgrounds so prevalent in the show have been all fucked up here, opting for bland gradients and shit like that. Is it really so hard to just do an ink splatter or watercolor puke like the show? Goddamn, anyway, the characters are sloppy, but in a good way, think the super distorted sloppies from the show. They DID manage to keep in the tradition of making every single facial expression and body distortion unique, which is so integral to the R&S experience. Some of the facials were so grossed-out and distorted it was barely recognizable, which is awesome. I'd even go as far to say as the distortions go beyond what you would see on the show. In that sense, the comic is worth it just for that. God its amazing again to see how much influence R&S has had on the industry, ATHF you can thank your "progressive" ass for this. Talk about plotlines that start off super structured and dissolve into piles of nightmarish emptiness, the comic starts off with the fellas winning their own radio station, which turns out can only broadcast a signal 2000 centimeters, barely to the nearest freeway (route 666), "You're a genius! America is covered with freeways!" yeah that one stuck with me. Simplistic punk emptiness disguised in children's comics. So the deterioration takes them to jail and then the tangent arc brings them on a drawn-out quest to sell tons of pig jowels for a longwhile, PTM shows up for some reason and does nothing, as usual, and a solid homo-erotic closer. Ren's greed is beautifully illustrated throughout. Stimpy fell kinda flat, not behaving nearly as retarded as he should, and perhaps Ren could have been a bit more evil, but comics are generally made a bit kiddier, so whatever. When you are at such a low and desperate point where you have to have more R&S, and you've already sent your emails to Spike pleading for more Adult Party Cartoon, this is I guess where you end up. You need your old childhood friends to be doing stuff you haven't seen before, our brains are just fucked like that. Read the earlier comics, skip this one until you get up to it, I always hate specials, I thought this would be interesting given it has a companion CD, but overall it's not quite up to the par of the older issues. Long live George Liquor.
No comments:
Post a Comment