Crass Sophisticate #7
Well, it may not be the first issue of the series, but it still goes a long way to seeing what this series was like in the early days. One obvious change? It’s just Josh with the writing and the art this time around, with his later partner Justin Rosenberg contributing only a one page strip at the end about the poor timing of Death arriving. It’s funny but it looks like crap. For anyone who’s looking for a pull quote, no smartass, I do not mean that for the whole series or even this issue, just that last little strip at the end. This issue, as you can probably tell from the cover, has some celebrity “guest stars”. Wait, what is it that you call it when a creative team uses the likenesses of celebrities without their permission? Satire? OK, we’ll go with that. The issue starts off with a group of friends leaving a showing of the Jennifer Aniston movie Derailed (2005, so you can place the release date of the comic a little bit too), remarking that they enjoyed the movie. One of them makes the point that it’s obvious that Jennifer was lousy at giving head (based on her being unable to convincingly portray it in the movie), and that this probably had something to do with Brad Pitt leaving her for Angelina Jolie. Hey, I just realized: are all these celebrity names going to drive insane amounts of traffic to this site? Pamela Anderson Cindy Margolis Halle Berry! OK, now that I’ve crashed the site, the comic continues with the group of friends going to a crappy trendy Chicago eatery, at which point Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston walk in for dinner. Vince comes across as more than a little bit of a douchebag here, with his constant declarations that he IS Chicago, and things continue on in this vein until he points out that she’s clearly lousy at giving head. She takes him up on the challenge but he needs to visualize a Chicago hot dog with all the fixings to get aroused, and she ruins the whole thing by bringing up the concept of ketchup on a hot dog. This is forbidden for some reason in Chicago, she leaves the bar and eventually ends up in a confrontation with Jolie. Meanwhile Richard Roeper shows up to get an interview with them but ends up showing that he is the one with the real BJ skills, and things get a little gory from there. Clearly Josh already had a good idea of what kind of stories he wanted to tell early on, and frankly this looks pretty much like the more recent issues do. There’s generally a stronger story in the more recent stuff, but this is a pretty funny comic is you (like I) really can’t stand any of the three celebrities involved. Check it out why don’t you? $1.50
