"Ahhh! Your cum... It's killing me... Ahhh!!" is what the villain of Prison Pit screams as his body is disintegrated by our hero's toxic orgasm. I think Johnny Ryan expected that to be gross, or problematic, or funny. Instead, like the rest of Prison Pit, it is just really dull.
Our protagonist, an Orc-like brute called Cannibal Fuckface, brutally mauls and rapes his enemies, then mauls and rapes them again after dark, cosmic magic mutates their corpses into more garish and deadly forms. This happens over and over again, for more than 700 pages, then the book ends.
Johnny Ryan has scrounged the dark recesses of his mind for anything controversial and gross that he can throw at the reader. Unfortunately, he ran out of new concepts at about page 6. Shit, piss, jizz, rape, cocks, vaginas, swastikas, and racial and homophobic slurs are smeared across every page, like faeces on the wall of a public toilet. It's juvenile, and whoever did it obviously thought it was very funny, even though it's not.
It's that very 2000s brand of wilfully ignorant, fuck-you-Mum, controversial humour loved by crusty, fourteen-year-olds. Think of a particularly vile episode of South Park, except without the humour or the clever satire. I wish I could say that it offended me, at least then I would have felt something. Instead I was just bored. On page 100, a gremlin creature was jerking itself off so that it could make a war-golem out of it's own splooge. Reading it, I felt only apathy. Trust me, it sounds more interesting than it actually is. Prison Pit is like watching a child mash action figures against each other, except they're all covered in poo, which I guess is meant to make it funny.
Is Prison Pit weird? Yeah. Is it something my Granny wouldn't like? It would make her scream. Was it substantial enough to sustain my interest across 700 pages? Nah.
The artwork consists of crass, black and white drawings that recall the strange monsters a weird kid scrawls in the margins of their math's textbook. And as a former weird kid myself, that is something I could appreciate. I really liked some of Ryan's characters and panels. There was some striking visuals and creative design work. It is what originally attracted me to the series. The quality of these drawings, however, was by no means consistent. At times, the art is quite lazy, with some panels being cramped and unintelligible, whilst others feel sparse and unfinished. Some of the characters' movements feel flat and unconvincing. If you are interested in this book for the art, check out the twisted works of Tetsunori Tawaraya. His work is similar but better.
Even the best of the art was not enough to compensate for the eye-rolling writing, nor the repetitive story. Writing the word "faggot" is not really subversive, punk, or interesting, despite what Johnny Ryan may have thought.
This book should have been a fun read, but it wasn't. Save yourself the money and watch your dog take a shit - you'll get as much out of it as you will reading this book.