Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
With such bold claims such as “Joseph Patrick Larkin claimed to be possessed by a demon he called el chupacabra; this ‘goat-sucker’ supposedly forced Larkin to draw vicious cartoons that raged against the teachings of Christ” and “The most defining characteristic of his body of work is his flagrant, unapologetic and constant use of the word ‘cunt’ ” in the forward, I was prepared for an enjoyable, cringe-worthy read. Instead, I had to cringe when art-plate captions informed me “This is deeply troubling” when the page itself wasn’t satisfyingly troubling on its own.
I had the sense that the author knew what disgusting and perverted should be, but wasn’t really disgusting and perverted to the degree claimed himself. Arcade of Cruelty includes a table of contents that promises such inspired chapters as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Pale Ghost Art, Comic Strips, Excerpts from Joseph Patrick Larkin’s Beat-Off Binders, Sketchbook Excerpts, More Sketchbook Excerpts, Excerpts from the Unbearable Lightness of Being Raped, Excerpts from Always Never Forgetting, and Die, Pig Die: A Play in One Act.
In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, pages from yearbooks and photographs from school are edited with pen scribbles such as the word SENIOR in SENIOR BASKETBALL TEAM being crossed out and replaced with “SATANIC.” Word balloons are drawn in that say “I Am a Faggot” and “HEIL HITLER.”
Mr. Larkin’s Comic Strips and Excerpts from Always Never Forgetting suffer from the artist’s insistence upon drawing only the heads and shoulders of his characters (with the exception of a lone penguin) and the use of word-processed font instead of hand lettering in his word balloons. This makes for a considerable amount of tedium and deprives the reader of seeing the imagination and intelligence behind the comics. Had the author pushed his style of humor and experimented with his line work and typography to their fullest extent, the reader would have been able to glimpse the sense of truth and honesty one intuitively experiences when looking at art.
The artistic-plate style of the content especially detracts from Excerpts from Joseph Patrick Larkin’s Beat-Off Binders. Though the author claims these pages reveal the disturbed inner workings of some sort of sexual deviant, that sentiment feels unauthentic. A two-page spread of Clarissa Explains It All star Melissa Joan Hart clippings, for example, does little more than demonstrate the author’s straight, typical adolescent male’s fantasies. This could possibly be shocking if one were living in a bubble.
The provocatively-titled Excerpts from the Unbearable Lightness of Being Raped opens with the introduction:
Joseph Patrick Larkin began work on a funny-book that was to be titled The Unbearable Lightness of Being Raped in May of 2005. Our hero had planned to draw a number of humorous comic strips with rape as his muse, but he only managed to squeeze out a few cartoons before he gave up on the project for good in June of 2005. Eat a bucket of dicks.
What follows are six comics, one of which depicts Clarence, “the World’s Most Considerate Rapist” asking a crying woman: “So…did you cum?” Unfortunately, the artwork to support the humor retains the same dull head-and-shoulder-word-processed-font detachment. It lacks any authentic details of the struggle or even enough flexibility to show Clarence re-zipping his pants. For a cartoonist that claimed to be obsessed, vulgar, and shocking, this comes across as either lazy or even a (though vehemently denied) discomfort with truely disturbing material.
Final Verdict: An impressive feat of self-publication in need of a great deal of self-editing (and no, I don’t mean self-censoring).
Arcade of Cruelty by Joseph Patrick Larkin may be purchased for $18 on either Amazon or Mr. Larkin’s website, also-ran.com.
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