Legal Action Comics, Vol. 1
edited by Danny Hellman
The Dirty Danny Legal Defense Fund

Boy, oh boy does this illustrated anthology have blowjobs.

Well, only seven. But it feels like more — perhaps because there are also two references to blowjobs. Plus, there's an incident of bottle fucking. Not to mention the porridge fucking, monkey ball licking, Godzilla butt-humping (with lube), a mother getting glued to her son's penis, two incidents of platypus fucking and that scene featuring dogs pissing on dogs playing poker.

"Legal Action Comics" could stand to be cleaned up a little.

But before any further Puritanical outbursts, it's probably a good idea to explain the genesis of this remarkable collection.

In short, underground cartoonist Danny Hellman is being sued by well-established editorial cartoonist Ted Rall. Those interested in the many sordid details of the case should check out Hellman's detailed account, on his well-maintained website.

Rall doesn't discuss the case on his own site, but that's not surprising. The facts of the case (he's suing Hellman for a life-ruining sum of money over satirical nonsense email sent in Rall's name) seem to speak for themselves: Rall is a apparently world-class asshole out to destroy a man's life over a petty dispute.

This is sad, because cartooning's already a pretty tough life. And Rall's a tremendously good editorial cartoonist — one wishes that he might also turn out to be a decent human being. Apparently, no such luck.

"Legal Action Comics," then, is Hellman's attempt to raise legal fees by creating a massive comics compilation loosely arranged around the theme of not destroying people's lives with nuisance lawsuits.

Not surprisingly, this resonates with other cartoonists. Talented contributors including R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Kaz, James Kochalka, and Tony Millionaire join Hellman and a host of notables from the world of independent and underground cartooning.

Now, back to the porridge fucking.

Undoubtedly, one of the problems with a project like "Legal Action Comics" is that everyone wants to contribute, and it's pretty hard to turn people away. When you boil away the noise, a sizable chunk of "Legal Action Comics" is high-school level shock humor and/or similarly dull "art" comics that are so thickly drenched in underground cred that they stink.

Dismemberments, anal rape, bestiality, incest, etc. etc. — quite often the more explicit elements of "Legal Action Comics" sometimes seem to be present only to establish a sort of respectable anti-respectability. In truth, much of the book's best stuff is amongst its cleanest.

But not universally. Frankly? The porridge fucking was funny. Ditto for the monkey ball licking. It was laugh-out-loud funny, and shouldn't be cut from anything, except maybe a wedding program, or an annotated heirloom Bible.

Regardless, "Legal Action Comics" is deep enough and broad enough that there's something for almost everyone who can wade through the remainder with a patient smile. There's some real substance to the book. It begins with a few clever strips satiring aggression directed at satire itself. Renee French's "Steelhead" follows; it's a gorgeously illustrated and wordless short story worthy of Jim Woodring's most lavish flights of fancy. Gregory Benton's "Powdertooth" is a sad little urban vignette as thoughtful as it is artistically rendererd. And Dean Haspiel and David Lasky's "Sex Lives of Super Heroes" has an understated (and non-explicit) wit that quite a few of the other comics in the collection could take lessons from.

Crumb and Spiegelman — as good as they come — only make token appearances in "Legal Action Comics," so it's up to others to carry the book's water. Millionaire does his usual stuff: He presents a cocktail of 19th-century obscenities mixed with visual absurdity, and it's great. Kochalka, who has more gentle wit than almost any other working illustrator, lends a pile of crude but amusing one-offs about a boner-wielding frog. And Hellman himself presents some great stuff about a free-roaming brain-stem attached to a human body.

The rest of the book's contributions range from sublimely clever to embarassingly sloppy collages that could have comfortably been given the boot. The book is thick by comic standards, at 256 pages. Like many (if not most) anthologies, its diversity is both its strength and its weakness.

"Legal Action Comics" supports a worthy cause, and this sometimes brilliant pastiche of contemporary cartooning is certainly worth the price of purchase. However, it'd be worth twice as much if it were half as long.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)