Croc and Roll: issue #1.
Written by Hamish Steel.
Art by George Williams.
£12 and available at Gosh Comics here.
This was a hard read. I tried it four times and finally got to the last page. My first impulse was to write that this was a lazy, unfunny, badly drawn and a mess of self-involved comics mediocrity.
But No.
The joke was almost on me dear reader.
The moment hit me like Pythagoras in his bath and I figured out the code. Like a computer scientist I studied the data and then after countless hours, finally the reality of this book dawned on me. That moment of revelation came like a lightning bolt.
This comic is humorless for a reason. This is badly coloured, drawn and dialogued for a reason.
This tracks like a story told to a parent by their toddler with added blue material for a reason.
Croc and Roll: issue #1, my old mate, is a coded polemic on the ‘Post Humour Age’ we are now living.
Think about it.
Why would this comic get made if it wasn’t a huge joke on the purchaser and the public beyond.
All the clues are there. You just need to follow them.
This comic was made in Hamish’s spare time when not Mario Carting or talking about Doctor Who he squeezed out the script out for Croc ‘n’ Roll.
That spare time certainly was not wasted. Cunningly approached with an eye to ill-written, babyish, and asinine dialogue. A faux stylistic and artistic chasing of those clearly despised adult babies who ‘OMG’ and ‘Wow’ their blank-eyed way through life.
So, when he does his joke about typing ‘Duck’ rather than ‘Fuck’ it is in fact a commentary on modern society and how older generations do not ‘Get Kids’ (and are all Nazis). Older squares who got left behind at the dawn of Netflix animation and cannot understand the complexities of the modern world. I bet those same boring book readers also do not understand much in this allegory on the clash of innovative ideas versus old and stale ideas!!!! (I added three exclamation marks for emphasis).
Hamish and Co have hit on a grand idea and approach here. What we so desperately need is a comic so anodyne that it really will not make you laugh. That is true art! That is true writing! This is ground-breaking comedy!!!!! (Five times).
What we really need is a comic based around a rather crap play on words with a script that could have been written by a Twitter AI bot that only grabs linguistic markers from posts that say, ‘Translate this hot take.’
These glorious creators are proving Philip Roth right when he said “Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art” – literally!
Let me shout this again! Hamish and Co. Have triumphed! They deserve a round of applause for something so meta that not even Mel and Sue could have figured it out.
Here is what was described on the Kickstarter page – ‘Hamish had the idea during a comics jam when the conversation turned to the 80s/90s anthros-with-attitude genre of cartoon: TMNT, Biker Mice, Street Sharks, etc. Originally, the title was “C*ck-Suckin Crocs Who Rock!!” but it didn’t seem marketable as the all-ages adventure it became. (he/him).’
I bet that stopped you doubting my satire theory!
This is a comic full of nuance and subtlety. Ignore the sudden changes in background colours or the images that look like someone got their kid to colour it in with crayons. Or the lettering that is often quite difficult to make out. Even the caricatures of the creative team in the back pages look out at the reader with a knowing wink that any so-called intellectual novelist would have been proud of.
This comic may seem rushed and predictable and so obvious it ties your stomach in knots but that is because you are an ophidiophobia, podophic, kapelaphobia boomer. You could learn a lot from this book, if only you bought a copy and looked beyond how shit it at first appears.
It is also bright pink and looks cool.
I will leave you to make your own judgements. You can buy a comic here.
You are open to interpret it freely …. and wrongly.
But thanks for reading nevertheless.
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