"It's called "Comic Book" and it's a cure to political correctness. There's this whole fucking Barbra Streisand movement to make people pretend they're not human; that they don't have human desires and they don't say human things in real life, and all it does is frustrate your natural urges. Eventually we're all going to become mass murderers. We're suppressing everything that comes natural to us. If there is any place where you should let out all of your frustrations, it's entertainment. Everybody has evil dirty thoughts. Most men love pretty girls; you're not supposed to love pretty girls anymore, which is like insane. If you hate all that stuff, you should buy our comic book. Our comic book is all about humanity. It's about the things that you really think about but you're afraid to say to anybody. It'll be in comic book stores and record stores. It's in color, but it's printed on crappy paper, like old comic books. It's not trying to be slick or anything."
—John Kricfalusi in an interview with Boing Boing
Spümcø Comic Book is a short lived comic book series created by John Kricfalusi, published by Dark Horse Comics for the first three issues in 1995, and then one more issue by Marvel Comics in 1997. It stars his characters George Liquor (American), Jimmy The Idiot Boy and Sody Pop.
Despite having a great stable of cartoonists working on it, the comic failed to find an audience and sold poorly due to a catch 22 situation; at the time, comic book stores usually only attracted audiences of superhero comics, who simply weren't interested in the gag oriented stories, and they weren't able to get regular book stores to sell the comics instead, dooming the series to a meager four issue run.
The first issues of both the Dark Horse run and the one-issue Marvel run were later republished in hardcover by Yoe Books, complete with a previously unpublished story.
Tropes:
- Advertised Extra: Sody Pop appears on the cover and binding of the comics hardcover collection, even though she only appears in a two-page story in the book.
- Alien Abduction: The ending of "Jimmy the Turtle Food Collector" has Jimmy being randomly abducted by an alien as food. Curiously, two of them are wearing the same hat he has on.
- Ass Shove: In "Remote Control Jimmy", Jimmy uses his remote control to make a turd Dirty Dog had just laid go right back into his butt. Angered, he forces Cigarettes the Cat to pull it back out.
- Catholic School Girls Rule: In the first issue, Jimmy the Idiot Boy encounters a group of flirty, sexy girls who attend a Catholic school and dress in tight fitting shirts and skirts. Jimmy uses his remote control to blow up their skirts in one panel.
- Deconstructive Parody: The unpublished story "Nutty the Friendly Dump", where Jimmy has to give up his pet turd, is a parody of pathos scenes in movies a la the Ren & Stimpy episode "Son of Stimpy".
- Early-Bird Cameo: Cigarettes the Cat and Dirty Dog make a brief appearance later in "Remote Control Jimmy", predating their appearances as the main characters of Weekend Pussy Hunt.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
- It's a comic book by Spümcø. Need we say more?
- The one page story "Young Jimmy Peels a Scab", in which Jimmy feels a scab (and stores it in a milk bottle for later).
- Flowery Insults: The Dirty Mouth Bass that George Liquor encounters in issue #2 has a very colorful vocabulary to go hand in hand with his ornery personality, to say the least. He can hardly go a panel without hurling some kind of creative insult at George as the latter tries to catch him. George tolerates it at first, but after being prodded enough times by the fish, he finally snaps and goes all out trying to catch him.
- Gainax Ending: Issue #2 has a story involving George Liquor getting into a spate with a Dirty Mouth Bass that he's trying to catch, which bizarrely ends with the former adopting the bass as his son.
- Grossout Show: As expected from the creator of Ren & Stimpy, there are plenty of gross-out jokes to go around in these comics.
- Ham-to-Ham Combat: The fishing story in issue #2 has the ever prideful and hot-blooded George Liquor put up against a particularly ornery and foul-mouthed bass, with the conflict eventually escalating into who can out-ham who once George gets prodded enough by the fish.
- Non-Mammal Mammaries: In the "Jimmy the Turtle Food Collector" story, Jimmy is looking for bugs to feed turtles with, and one bug he comes across is a pregnant silverfish, who is drawn with (nippleless) breasts.
- Shout-Out:
- In issue one, the schoolgirls Jimmy the Idiot Boy watches attend St. Clampetts.
- The "Nutty the Friendly Dump" story is dedicated to someone named Chuck Jone.note . The title is also a reference to Casper the Friendly Ghost.
- Show Within a Show: In the unpublished "Nutty the Friendly Dump" story, Jimmy the Idiot Boy is reading a issue of Spumco Comic Book while sitting on the john.
- Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: Jimmy the Idiot Boy is impossibly stupid.
- The Voiceless: Jimmy the Idiot Boy. He has no dialogue at all, since he's too stupid to even know how to speak.
- Vulgar Humor: A lot of the humor is based on shock value and gross-out gags. As the opening quote states, John K. intentionally made the comic to spit in the face of any kind of political correctness.
