3.82 avg rating — 531 ratings

"I don't actually consider any of these comics to be in bad taste, but they're definitely offensive to some... which was largely the intent, I think, and part of their 'charm'. This one left my brain coated in a nasty psychic residue. By the time you work through all the shit and cannibalism and whatnot, you'll feel an acute need for a long shower. The final story is by far the best, as Maruo's razor-sharp linework reaches its prime. It also happens to be the longest and most engaging, but... wow. Maruo spends a lot of time in mental places most people can't even glance at."

3.71 avg rating — 678 ratings

"What the fuck is wrong with Johnny Ryan? Maybe nothing. He's probably one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet, while Jim Davis and Scott Adams might be sociopaths... which would kind of make sense."

3.70 avg rating — 637 ratings

4.33 avg rating — 30 ratings

"Wilson was officially credited with the invention of bad taste, I believe, in 1966. Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein dispute this, citing some manner of patent dating back to 1950."

3.75 avg rating — 24 ratings

"And then there's this infamous atrocity. This brain-dead Floridian became a first amendment hero when he got busted by a puritanical cop and prosecuted by a publicity-hungry DA. He's a death metal kid from Florida who creates stories about the worst things he can conjure up via pencil, paper and Cannibal Corpse played as loudly as possible. Johnny Ryan's artistic inspiration. Seriously."

3.67 avg rating — 378 ratings

4.10 avg rating — 69 ratings

"It starts off ugly and crude, and Loady McGee and Sinus O'Gynus both look a bit weird, but by the last third of the book, his experience shows... you're seeing Johnny Ryan approaching his 'prime' -- his best art and sharpest humor... which is still ugly and crude. But really fucking funny."

3.94 avg rating — 1,566 ratings

"I didn't add this book, actually, but it's a perfect example of art that sounds completely gratuitous if you break it down to a list of offensive subject matter -- a dick inexplicably sprouts the tiny, talking, biting head of then-president Ronald Reagan; a hapless janitor's asshole becomes a portal through which another dimension disposes of its garbage; necrophilia, genital mutilation, etc. -- but Brown manages to keep his otherworldly story-telling from feeling malicious or deliberately outrageous. His stream-of-consciousness narrative is surprisingly poignant when it's not completely fucked-up and hilarious. Every time I read this book, and I've read it several times between finding a copy of the Vortex edition over a decade ago and picking up the beautiful and long-overdue re-release from D & Q last year, it pisses me off that Brown abandoned 'Underwater' part-way through. It was a fascinating series, and my copies were lost when I loaned them out. Even if it remains unfinished, it should be collected. It seems wrong to leave any material from a creator as important as Brown on the cutting room floor, so to speak."

3.71 avg rating — 497 ratings

4.15 avg rating — 122 ratings

3.92 avg rating — 117 ratings

3.73 avg rating — 120 ratings

3.65 avg rating — 4,399 ratings

"Crossed is exactly what it set out to be, Garth Ennis and a reduction et absurdum (I think that's right) for the 'survival horror' sub-genre kick-started by the Walking Dead. Ennis has an understanding of the motivations and mechanics of violence that I would stack up against any storyteller in any medium. He sets a familiar apocalypse in motion, makes it even more terrifying, then follows the tale, regardless where it leads... and it takes the reader to some very ugly places, refusing to look away or provide hope for any last second miracles."

4.14 avg rating — 3,507 ratings

4.29 avg rating — 17 ratings

4.24 avg rating — 1,453 ratings

3.27 avg rating — 113 ratings

"Shintaro Kago needs more than one spot. Nothing tastes worse than his ero-guro scat-gore necrophiliac craziness. Like Maruo, but more-so. Both artists take stylistic inspiration from Otomo, and the clean, realistic illustration makes everything so much worse. Maybe horror is more tolerable under cover of night, half obscured by shadows. Kago breeds your worst nightmare with a porno that ends as a snuff film."

3.61 avg rating — 119 ratings

3.68 avg rating — 101 ratings

"'Punctures' by Kago, contemp. artist Aida Makoto's fucked-up manga, and 'Life of Momongo' by Junko Mizuno. Great stuff."

4.10 avg rating — 736 ratings

4.16 avg rating — 101 ratings

"Killoffer takes a trip to Quebec, and tries his luck picking up French-Canadian women. After a few pages, the captions end, and a wordless psychological battle begins. Published as a 10" x 14" art showcase, super-artist Killoffer super-draws 48 super-pages, in which the inexplicably replicating author has his hotel room invaded. These identical copies are avatars of the many impulses and hungers and fears that make up his unconscious mind, now unchecked and running rampant through the neighborhood, raping and pillaging. He begins doing away with each of them in various disgusting methods, and his self-destructive tendencies work to his advantage, as the doppelgangers start raping, mutilating, and butchering themselves. This short book is a BD blitzkrieg and a psychological drama that takes no prisoners. Using a sustained metaphor with a brilliant simplicity, he lets his masterfully composed pages of high-contrast art say everything that needs to be said. Disturbing. Genius."

4.44 avg rating — 9 ratings

4.05 avg rating — 232 ratings

"Julie Doucet made her name by creating comics that held nothing back. 'Dirty Plotte' was funny, emotionally authentic and seemingly guileless; but behind the earnest explorations of topics previously untouched by other cartoonists was a keen intellect that was consciously provocative."

4.29 avg rating — 585 ratings

"Maakies has lightened up over the years, but it began with an endlessly inventive array of gags involving booze, suicide, venereal diseases, booze, and a monkey named Uncle Gabby... who may or may not have been constructed using a sock. It's still the best argument for not completely writing off the newspaper comic-strip as long past its expiry date, but I miss the Maakies of old, when Tony Millionaire was a weird and angry enigma of semi-mythical dimensions, and the humor was so black that light could barely escape its gravitational pull. "

4.29 avg rating — 585 ratings

4.11 avg rating — 3,785 ratings

"While it's pretty lightweight compared to other titles on the list in terms of taboo subject matter, in concept and execution this is still disturbing and politically incorrect. Junji Ito has an imagination that is pretty impressive; he can wring 800 pages out of an idea that would utterly confound most writers. How many cartoonists could create a horror masterpiece about SPIRALS? Where would you even start? How about dead fishes on robotic spider-legs? WTF?! And yet he bites down on these crazy-ass concepts with remarkable tenacity and seriousness. The 'Tomie' stories were among his first, about a beautiful school-girl (why is it always schoolgirls? Do women cease to exist in Japan after their 18th birthday?) who is murdered by an infatuated student, only to show up in class a few days later like nothing happened. Again and again, she has men and boys fall in love with her, manipulating her obsessive suitors in a cold and unnatural way, until she is inevitably hacked to pieces by one of them. The story seems to imply that she is somehow to blame every time some sick fuck goes at her with a ginsu knife, and as the stories get longer and the art improves, she is closer to a virus than a person. Each dismembered chunk of her body gradually turns into another Tomie, in a properly disgusting way. This leads to power struggles between the various copies and their respective devotees. Dark Horse published two more volumes in the 'Museum of Terror' series, and the second one collects the rest of the Tomie stories. "

3.32 avg rating — 22 ratings

"This anthology was a fund-raiser for 'Dirty' Danny Hellman, who was being sued by fellow cartoonist and general dickhead Ted Rall, over an e-mail prank where Hellman pretended to be Rall. Provoked by an editorial where Rall criticized Art Spiegelman, a number of known and semi-known cartoonists came to Hellman's aid, including Spiegelman himself. Tony Millionaire was particularly generous, contributing a cover, an original story, and a couple of his most offensive and little-seen Maakies strips. The theme is sick humor and Rall-bashing, and Michael Kupperman, Henriette Valium, and Kim Deitch follow Millionaire's lead, with new works that are funny, clever, and offensive. Valium's story is amazing, especially his patently over-designed artwork, a strange mix of gothic realism and underground cartoonishness somewhere amidst Kaz, Crumb, and Charles Burns. Vincent Cato, best remembered for his blistering pages in Kramer's Ergot 6, where he went by the name 'Bald Eagles', takes the prize for most offensive story, involving a cat and a lot of weirdly uncalled-for gay slurs. But others come close, like Johnny Ryan and Sam Henderson, who deliver the straight-up funniest tales in the book. I don't know if I'd recommend this book to anyone, but for people who like humor with a bloody, disease-ridden edge, this is probably their kind of book. "

3.73 avg rating — 760 ratings

3.76 avg rating — 21 ratings

3.46 avg rating — 358 ratings

4.02 avg rating — 347 ratings

"Like many of the titles on the list, this is also a modern classic of sequential art. As the apotheosis of Dave Cooper's narrative explorations of desire, obsession, and sexual power-struggles, this critically acclaimed (it snagged some Harvey and Eisner awards, I believe) graphic novel has the immediacy and rawness of a memoir, but thankfully for Cooper, it isn't. Unfortunately, it would be his final word, as he's moved on to oil painting as his mode of expression. Given how much his canvases are selling for, and how scary-talented he is, you really can't fault him for it."

4.13 avg rating — 30 ratings

4.50 avg rating — 4 ratings

3.59 avg rating — 184 ratings

"Not to be confused with Ivan Brunetti, Ivan Brun is a French artist with a look and thematic interest similar to Emile Bravo. I first discovered his wordless comics in the pages of the much-missed anthology Mome. Incendiary political critiques whose pleasantly cartoony approach only slightly diminishes the raw, unflinching explorations of the brutal exploitation and suffering just outside our visual periphery. His jet-black humor is no doubt offensive to some, and the calculated disconnect between style and substance is disturbing."

4.49 avg rating — 65,420 ratings

4.03 avg rating — 36 ratings

4.19 avg rating — 43 ratings

"It might require a reverse mortgage or a second job in recreational pharmaceuticals, but the Zap Comix Box-set coming out in December 2014 is THE super-deluxe collection to pick up. If you need an excuse, the $450.00 price-tag will seem really reasonable in a year or two, when it's going for $1000.00 (at least). Underground comics began here, for all intents and purposes. While the lingo and humor are pleasantly dated, the stories are just as offensive as ever. Mr. Natural and Devil Girl, the Checkered Demon, the Trashman, art and comics by legends like Robert Williams and Rick Griffin... guaranteed to piss off 99.99% of the population. If you're the 1 in 10 000 who can appreciate dangerous and irresponsible scribbling, this is the grail of the underground. "

3.89 avg rating — 102 ratings

"How could I have forgotten this? It's pretty tame by today's standards as far as the sex is concerned, but the casual misogyny is so much more offensive. I think it's the way it's done without thinking, as if the idea someone might be offended never occurred to them. Different times. Kurtzman rocks, but the humor is dated. The art of Will Elder is incredible though."

3.65 avg rating — 31 ratings

"Although this piece of shit possesses no redeeming qualities, making it a pointless addition, I thought one example of the 'utter shite' genre would be appropriate. Chicks with costumes that always leave their tits and asses exposed to readers, the weather, and whoever it is they're killing. A psychopath dressed like Batman, but with claws. He quotes classic literature, but nothing the characters do or say ever make sense... I might delete this. Everything else has some artistic merit, this does not. But this tastes worse than reprocessed vomit stuffed inside Pop-tarts... which themselves are only slightly more nutritious than depleted uranium."

4.76 avg rating — 17 ratings

"I don't own this book, and haven't read a digital version, but I do have several of the earlier issues in a longbox somewhere. This was a fucking hilarious comic, and was hell-bent on going to all those nasty places other cartoonists avoid. Aborted fetuses played a big role, turned into Zombies by the Voodoo priest with the wooden mask that didn't come off. I seem to recall a hitman who was inordinately proud of his abilities as an assassin, even though his specialty was babies. I guess he didn't dig infants much. I wonder if he's a father now? I wonder if his girlfriend/wife ever read his comics? "

3.93 avg rating — 96 ratings

3.67 avg rating — 9 ratings

3.81 avg rating — 1,635 ratings

"Joe Matt takes confessional comics to new levels of brutal honesty. His talent as an artist and appealing, cartoony style makes some of the darker revelations a bit easier to handle... and he's also funny as hell. Collecting issues of his series 'Peepshow', 'The Poor Bastard' follows the author's daily misadventures as a broke American cartoonist living in Toronto. It's kind of like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' (if Larry David was on welfare), complete with Seinfeld-esque coffee-shop conversations featuring 'celebrity' guest-stars Seth and Chester Brown. But Matt started 'Peepshow' long before Seinfeld became a cultural institution, taking inspiration from autobiographical comics by R. Crumb, Justin Green, Spain Rodriguez, and Art Spiegelman.

'The Poor Bastard' -- like 'Peepshow', 'Fair Weather' and 'Spent' -- is superbly rendered and designed, with the high quality production values Drawn and Quarterly are known for. Matt's love for classic cartoonists like Carl Barks clearly informs his tasteful style, and off-sets the sometimes tasteless subject matter. But you have to respect his honesty. His porn fixation (for example, which is not the taboo it was in the early nineties) and terrible treatment of his long-suffering girlfriend -- including an instance of domestic violence -- are depicted with a remarkable objectivity, resisting the impulse to explain or justify his often lousy behavior. Whatever the psychological motivations, 'The Poor Bastard' is one of the most important memoirs of the early nineties, alongside 'My New York Diary' by Julie Doucet, 'Epileptic' by David B., and 'The Playboy' by Chester Brown."

4.20 avg rating — 46 ratings