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Cruel World is a vindictive attempt to make you laugh and somehow find endearing the sickest sexually perverse sequential art I have read to date. Featuring overly pimply teens, severed male heads indulging themselves in a naked woman's breast while she sits on the toilet, one cannot help but feel this series is a crueul joke on the mind-but I have to tell you is actually well done!
Involving mostly oversexed teens and a sperm seeking to making it big in Hollywood (hence his name Hollywood Sperm), each comic provides episodic shorts that take us into the deep recesses of a clearly disturbed and under stimulated (or over stimulated) Australian, Anton Emdin.
Definitely not for those who are offended easily, Cruel World provides plenty of chuckles at gags only meant to make you groan. Sweet Valley Thigh in issue 6 set up the entire set perfectly. Two high school students - Beth, the extremely ugly one, and Cindy, the somewhat better looking blond, find themselves in a predicament when Cindy believes she has killed one of her classmates. So the two try to cover up the situation only to find that the dead boy might actually be a zombie, so he must be stopped! As the story unfolds we get plenty of unnecessary female nudity and teen sex with Becky and a boy, whose penis met an unfortunate accident with a wooden leg.
Then of course there is the adorable Hollywood Sperm who only wants to be taken as a serious thespian, and move on from pornography films. Moving along to the Legend of the Brown Nose, Emdin really crosses the line, even further than South Park did with Mr. Hanky kissing people. Emdin tells, what I hope is a fictional story, of he and his friends on a trip to South Africa, where Emdin learned about the legend of the brown nose after one of the boys pulled down his pants stuck his finger in his butt and wipes what comes out under someone's nose.
I will not go on any further, you will have to buy the comics if you wish to make yourself even more nauseous. But it gets even stranger when a disregarded penis takes root and grows into some type of tree and the psychotic stylings of Squiver (Squirrel/Beaver) and a wasp with a really nasty attitude find themselves always in pain, horny, or dead.
The artwork in this series is just plain ugly. I mean every character is ugly, many missing appendages, and overly exaggerated. But taken in context with the short nonsensical and gross stories, everything fits perfectly. My only criticism is that I would like to see Emdin further develop his stories. They are way too short, and the characters could have a place in adult humor cartoons which are popping up here and there, like the BBC series Mr. Hell.
For something different in sequential art, that despite its perverse and gross nature can entertain - Cruel World will make this REAL cruel world seem a little less dark.
Send your comments and or questions about this article to Cosmicnerd@ybfree.com.