Dung Boys (1996) #1-3 by Robb Conaway and Marc McFinn

I’ve had some feedback on this blog? I mean the writing style on this blog? Several feedbackers? I mean, two? And they both said that it really annoyed them when I put a question mark after declarative sentences?

So now I’m going to write the entirety of the rest of this blog series this way? Valley Girl power forever! I mean ? not !?

?

Well, this is obviously British? It’s not just that the artist has obviously seen Tank Girl, but nobody does chaos like the Brits do: Their action/comedy books always start at 11 and then increase from there? I’m not familiar with Robb Conaway — googling him just pops up a bunch of Dung Boys pages, and comics.org lists this as his only book?

That seems pretty incredible, because this is a really funny book, and Conaway is obviously talented at drawing this sort of incessant insanity?

OH OK I CAN”T DO IT NO MORE

Another giveaway that we’re talking British comics is that the first issue opens with a scene where the cool Brits happen upon a whole bunch of American hillbillies (who are all homophobic and repressed, as usual), and then they kill off all the Americans. It’s fun!

Yes, I see.

Heh heh.

Lost Girls has nothing on the wild sex scenes in this book.

“The tight and shiny”? Is that a euphemism for penis?

Apparently! You learn something every day.

The storytelling is sometimes more than a bit choppy. There’s several pages where it’s just hard to tell in what sequence the panels should be read — this looks like it’s going vertical, but nope. So you get some backtracking when reading pages like this.

They explain the concept of humour. See?

The third issue is very different from the preceding two. First of all, it’s printed on newsprint (which I take to mean that the series didn’t sell well and they wanted to cut back on expenses), but most importantly, co-writer McFinn is gone. And with him, so have most of the jokes and almost all of the insanity.

Instead we get pretty earnest denunciations of religion and stuff, and that’s something of a departure. The layouts are also more traditional. I wonder whether this series was made over a number of years, with the first two done a couple years before the last issue? And Conaway did it on his own to have an ending to the series?

Oh, I must buy this book for this blog series… when organising this blog series, I used comics.org as a starting point, but they don’t include prose books, so I’ve been adding those as I’m going along. But I guess this one won’t arrive until I’m done with the blog, so I’m going to have to do some backfilling, so once we reach the final comic (which is Mona from 1999), I’ll be doing some additional posts with books like this I’ve missed the first time around.

I was unable to find any reviews of Dung Boys, but while googling, I happened upon this: All the Kitchen Sink records have been donated to Columbia? Neat.

This is the one hundred and ninety-eighth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.