LITERARYBook Reviews - The Erik Lavoie Issue
 PortaJohnny:
The Best of Angry Youth Comix
Johnny Ryan
Fantagraphics Books
Fuck Erik Lavoie. This is the shit. And HOLY SHIT is this book ever droll. If VICE had to summarize all its beliefs into one gigantic comic book, it would be Angry Youth Comix. It is poignant and crude and offensive and the funniest thing we’ve ever seen. Like the time Loady McGee bites off one of “Wad’s” tits because he can’t get enough milk. Or the futuristic space cop who blasts away five life points every time you make a racist joke. Portajohnny is living proof that the best way to make an omelette hilarious is to break every egg in the grocery store.
ERIK LAVOIE
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 Liverpool Fantasy
By Larry Kirwan
Thunder’s Mouth Press
Look, it’s the official gayest book we’ve ever received for review! This “alternative history” of the Beatles has them breaking up right after Please Please Me (that was really early if you didn’t know). Paul goes to Vegas to be a lounge singer. George becomes a Jesuit priest. John is on the dole and all. Ringo is boring, too. The scary level of fandom on display here is ripe for a sociological study. Kirwan makes the editor of Mojo look like a teenage girl with only two CD singles in her collection, and the only people who enjoy this will be similar sad cases and the odd person (like me) who is so fascinated by it that they can’t put it down until it’s over. To wit: Liverpool Fantasy is the literary equivalent of compulsively checking car wrecks for human remains. Even weirder is that the author sings in that band Black 47.
ERIK LAVOIE
 Not for Rent
Conversations with Creative Activists in the U.K.
Evil Twin Publications
The smell of patchouli, body odor, hand-rolled smokes and righteous indignation wafts out of the pages of Not for Rent, and we love it. This book is a collection of interviews with the crustiest punks in all of the U.K., where the crustiest punks in the world (besides maybe Amsterdam) live. Squatters, bike punks, radical eco-activists, riot grrls, bands like Chumbawumba and Red Monkey—all are included. The interviews are friendly and dangerously smart, and formatted in a way that will be very comforting to anybody who owes some of their adolescent mindblowing to the golden age of San Francisco’s Re/Search Books imprint. Not for Rent is a true labor of love and an ode to some of the bravest and funnest souls of contemporary times. You try living in lovely Birmingham without a toilet or heat, besieged by police dogs, just to defend your beliefs. Get this book right from the makers at www.eviltwinpublications.com.
ERIK LAVOIE
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 No Title Here
Photographs by Jeff Mermelsteinpower
House Books
Dear Aspiring Snapshot Photographer: Hang up your fucking jock because Jeff Mermelstein has won the race and you will never touch his shit. These photos are that good. A New Jersey native, Mermelstein has taken pictures for Life, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His work is funny but never heavy-handed, and often enticingly surreal. There is a dual edge of journalism and art in his photos, which makes them tons more valuable than just one or the other alone. I can think of no other photographer who makes a bar mitzvah look like the party of the century, or manages to photograph an armadillo race and not make it look like he is patronizing his subjects. You should see the picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barbara Bush, and some middle-aged aerobics babes. Shit is trippy.
ERIK LAVOIE
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 Overbite
Dave Cooper
Fantagraphics Books
Art & Beauty Magazine
Robert Crumb
Fantagraphics Books
Cursiv
David Choe
Giant Robot
Ever notice how artists can’t draw? They do a handful of illustrations and  we’re supposed to drop to our knees and pay $300 a print. Cartoonists, on the other hand, pound out six amazing illustrations a page and only ask you for $3.50. If you have any doubts about how superior they are, check out their forays into the art world. Choe, Cooper, and Crumb all have comic book backgrounds, but now that they’ve decided to focus on painting and drawing, renowned painters and drawers are shitting in their drawers. It’s like Wayne Gretzky after years of training with a cement filled puck jumping on to the ice and tossing the normal puck around like a rubber ball.
First, you start off like David Choe. A wise-ass vandal who does photocopied mini-comics and writes on walls. After a few issues of his comic Slow Jams, he decides to try out a book of illustrations. The result is an eye-popping pile of greatness that looks more like a compilation of urban artists than one man’s work.
Then you get to the Dave Cooper level. After winning a bunch of fancy comic book awards for masterpieces like Suckle and Weasel, Dave sighed and decided to try using oil paints. The result is a sublime and jarring collection of ominously pink women with fat asses and scary grins. It makes you horny and scared, like Gaspar Noé without the raping.
Eventually, after you’ve paid your dues through a lifetime of comics and art books, you become a fucking super-god like Robert Crumb. His new magazine is done in the same style as those art mags from the 40s that feature huge, full-page portraits of pretty girls with sincere little descriptions underneath. I’d get into it but there’s no sense in describing Crumb’s work. You are either in awe of it or you haven’t seen it.
When you put these three masterpieces back to back, the innate superiority of the cartoonist is impossible to deny. Practice makes perfect, and no artists practice more than cartoonists.
ERIK LAVOIE
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 Shrimpy and Paul
Marc Bell
Highwater Books
The beautiful baby boy who does those excellent lyric things for VICE has now completed a graphic novel of his two favorite guys, Shrimpy and Paul. Shrimpy is a stoic and small bean-shaped character whose unflappable wisdom always has the high-strung (and sausage-shaped) Paul in a tizzy. Like most of the cartoonists on this page, just staring at the relentlessly confident pen strokes are enough to justify sitting in the bath with this book (have a towel nearby to keep your hands dry), but after you get past that, you can also indulge in the cutest and strangest stories since your senile old grandmother became convinced she was magic.
ERIK LAVOIE
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 ESSAY DIE ONE
by Brace Paine
Brace is the secret other identity of the guy in The Gossip. This mimeographed zine of his is rad in the same way that Harmony Korine’s oft-overlooked novel was. Weird lists, reports from strange teendom suburbia, and elusive references to “maximum romance”. I’ll bet you could find this by calling the Kill Rock Stars label.
ERIK LAVOIE
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