Punks the Comic #1: Somebody has been watching old episodes of The Young Ones

Story: Joshua Hale Fialkov
Art: Kody Chamberlain & Rob Guillory
Publisher: Image comics
Released: 8th October 2014 


Half-way through reading this book I was getting flashbacks to old episodes of The Young Ones and going to the Cub Scouts on my bike with it’s stupid light dynamo that slowed it down to a crawl. There was something very 1980’s about this book, with it’s references to Morrissey and Glenn Danzig, so I did what we all do now and looked it up on the Internet expecting the book to be a re-make of some old student project in 1986. I got one half of the equation right. It was an old student type of deal, but it was produced in 2004.

2004????????

What the Hell????????

How did something like this get any attention whatsoever in 2004?

Oh yeah, it didn’t. I never noticed it in 2004, and I was a pretty big fan of just about everything comic book related during that time. What were the writers doing in 2004? Did they have a DVD box-set of old Young Ones episodes, a limited budget, and so decided to put a collage based comic book together with references that were completely out of date and had no relevance to the world around them?

It looks like it.

So what is this book about then? It’s about some characters based on 1980’s English student stereotypes living together in a house where they are very bored and are not very successful with the ladies. The characters are physically and emotionally abusive to each other, but in a wacky, comedy way. Crazy things like Gnomes are involved. The dialogue is all one-liners that are trying to be arch, ironic, knowing and clever. It doesn’t work, instead it reads like smart arse witticisms that come from the mind of a Google kid, annoying as f*** douche bag. The narrative involves one of the characters bringing a girl home. All of the other characters are shocked. Before this mess of a book ends we are given some word searches (I’m not joking) and a reprint of the original book from waaaaay back in ye olden days of 2004. That book is just as bad as the 2014 incarnation.

Oh, the characters have fists, dogs and old President’s for heads.

Does that make it original then?

What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I think. I think that ‘Punks the Comic’ is a painfully unfunny student magazine based on an anarchic BBC sit-com of the early 1980’s. That show, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, is called ‘The Young Ones.’ It was great when it first came out. I know, because I was a kid who grew up with it, and compared to all of the other staid and conservative po-faced crap of the time (Blue Peter anybody?) it was the most exciting thing that I had ever seen. But I was about twelve years old, and that was decades and decades ago. If they released the same show today it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact, because the socio-political themes, anxieties and concerns would be decades out of date. Plus the humour, that was considered risky and edgy at the time, would now look a bit tame, silly, childish and dated.

Just like this comic.

How the Hell is this supposed to be a post 9/11 book? It’s not. It’s a 1980’s book, it just so happens to have been written in 2004/2014 by a writer who cannot get in touch with what is going on in the world today.

Leave your house for five minutes and have a look at the world mate. Please. Read a book. Watch a documentary. Get on the Alex Jones infowars website http://www.infowars.com/  for a day of research. PLEASE DO SOMETHING. Get with the bloody times.

Goddamn it, Goddamn it, Goddamn it.

This book says everything you need to know about the comic book industry as it is today. Backwards looking, irrelevant, out of touch and completely stuck up it’s own arse.

Rating: 1/10 (for the cover)