Designed to shock and provoke with satiric intent, I'm sure, but the story is simply vile as we track an asshole movie producer through the making of his most recent film, a slasher flick for which he has hired a real serial killer to consult. Men behaving badly to the extreme. ( )

My local dealer (comics dealer, you know), who has a good sense of my tastes, recommended this book to me when it was in its third or fourth individual issue -- just late enough that it was easy to decide to wait for the collected volume that should surely ensue if it lived up to his praise. Well, here it is.

The book chronicles the misadventures of a manic movie producer who is balanced on the precipice of career decline. Well, I've read a lot of lurid, exploitative, and trashy comics in my day, and this title can certainly be classed with the worst (i.e. most effective) of them. Sex, drugs, gore, and basic inhumanity are all very well, but I'm pretty sure I've never before read a comic that seemed to harbor such affection for vomit.

That's Hollywood for you, I guess.

In addition to the first six issues of the comic, the volume contains reprints of all the individual issue covers (standard and variant) and some movie posters for imaginary films alluded to in the story: the space opera flop Cosmos, Zombie High (starring Sandra Masters and Penelope Envelope), Death Fist ("It is coming. You will die."), The Ten Commandments 2, and the film produced in the course of the present narrative Presidents Day.

The comedic pacing of the book is excellent, the allusions witty, and the overall effect profoundly gross, with a dollop of sentimentality.