Prison Pit 1-3

Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit is a breathless unbroken run of extraordinary violence, foul language,  and weird cosmic shit that is as inventive and awesome as it is ugly and puerile. It’s 300+ pages so far of non-stop mayhem and the pace doesn’t appear to be easing off, the themes aren’t changing, but in its unerring commitment to all-out carnage and roller-coaster pacing, it’s a masterpiece of sustained vision not seen since the glory days of 2000AD.

Prison Pit opens as a nameless alien convict is about to be dropped from high above a prison planet – as he’s  dispatched he drags a guard with him and as they fall they begin to fight and then the fighting never stops. The action takes place largely on the surface of the planet, a scrubby desert-like place, sparsely populated, where prison planet inmates wander alone or in gangs looking for territory, treasure and blood, lots and lots of blood.

The prisoners are the baddest of the bad, hideous, mutant killing machines capable of never-ending innovation in new and more apocalyptic ways to despatch their enemies. They are ruthlessly nihilistic and totally unsympathetic. Every encounter provokes a fight to the death – skulls are cleaved, spines extracted, limbs severed, guts spilled – no quarter is asked and none is given.

If you’ve not read Prison Pit and you have read Johnny Ryan’s previous, excruciatingly tasteless comics and collections, much of this sounds par for the course. In Angry Youth Comix and other excursions Ryan has scrupulously plumbed the depths of bad taste. And while Prison Pit is not for the easily offended, it has an epic, ceaselessly imaginative quality that’s kind of (would ya believe it) as if Jack Kirby came from an alternate punk universe where all he’d done is watched wrestling and tried to be Beavis and Butthead.

Much the same can be said of Ryan’s artwork – it’s got a similar solid dynamism to Kirby – but about one hundred times rougher – New Gods scrawled on a beer mat next to the mosh pit. It’s ratty for sure, but with it Ryan manages to sustain a very long largely wordless action comic, that however far-fetched always seems coherent and flowing.

How long this can continue to entertain remains to be seen. I was very surprised to see even a second issue  – the first seemed a one-off for sure – but now with a third out it’ll be interesting to see how long Ryan can effectively mine the Prison Pit.