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Boy’s Club 2
posted October 14, 2008
 



Creator: Matt Furie
Publishing Information: Buenaventura Press, comic book, 40 pages, June 2008, $4.95
Ordering Numbers: 9780980003994

I don't have much to say about the content of Matt Furie's follow-up to his very funny comic Boy's Club that I didn't say to likely greater poetic effect in my more focused review of that first issue. Just about everything I say there applies here. The humor in the second book is the same pitch-perfect distillation of the "roommates too poor, stupid and perhaps too chemically altered to stray very far away from the house" school of comedy. The vignettes are disconnected the way they were in the first book; the gags are equally funny and draw on even more specific observations. On one memorable page, a hungover member of the group climbs into a shower that's pooling water, then looks down to find he's still in his socks only to not care. That felt more like an experience I had than one I'm simply seeing, although I don't have that story to tell.

If anything's progressed here, it's that the aimless shenanigans of Brett, Andy, Landwolf and Pepe are placed in front of the reader with a greater clarity and a lot less abstract fuss, a kind of leap forward in presentation similar to the differences between the first two Evil Dead films. It's a very accessible book, and I'm not sure the first one was in the same way. Additionally, seeing more of the same out of the same crew of individuals feels poignant in a sense in that the characters are endearing because of their pitiful vapidity. A second issue feels like we're learning that these guys are like this all the damn time rather than simply once in a while. That's not really enough on which to hang a review, but I like these comics a lot, and wanted a chance to bring them to your attention one more time hoping that you'll seek them out so I can maybe someday have more.