Americannibals!

a horror comedy (with creator commentary)

Last post, I exhumed the corpse of my old webcomic blog.

Now it’s time for the autopsy.

The first organ to be weighed, after cracking open the old chest cavity (“crack” might be the wrong onomatopoeia to use considering the squishy state of decomposition the ribs are in…but I digress) is Americannibals!, the original comic I posted on my humble little website.

Ah, Americannibals! (yes, you must always include the exclamation point)…if you’re familiar with my previous posts you’ll know that I’m quite a fan of the horror genre—so what better place to start my sojourn into storytelling? Yes, I love horror—and all its different subgenres too, spanning the spectrum from body to cosmic, from the campiest of creature features all the way up to the roof of the A24 arthouse.

So horror it was. And considering that the cartoonish quality of my amateur art style wasn’t exactly equipped to deliver proper scares (unless you’re an art teacher…in which case, my apologies), horror comedy seemed the way to go.

Personally, when I think of horror comedies, I think of over-the-top, practical SFX heavy stuff like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, or creature comedies like Gremlins and its various bastard offspring (Ghoulies, Critters, Troll), some of which are intentionally funny, others unintentionally so (those are usually the funniest) rather than more recent self-aware fare like Shaun of the Dead, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, or Cabin in the Woods, which are fun as far as they go but—UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT—never really clicked with me, despite their popularity.

Which is ironic, since I think the satirical Americannibals! has much more in common with them than the sincere sort of stories I prefer.

But I’ll let you make up your own mind (or in this case refine your own palate) about what sort of story Americannibals! is.

Here’s the comic. Bon appétit!

For some reason, I couldn’t retrieve what is supposed to be the next page from any of the Wayback Machine captures, so I’ll just describe it here: blackness, then close on Boone’s eyes as he slowly wakes up; there’s a SPLAK SPLAK SPLAK sound coming from off-panel; we switch to Boone’s POV and see a big fat butcher chopping up some meat on a table; the Butcher, noticing that Boone is awake, turns around and, cleaver in-hand still dripping with blood, says “Oh…yer awake.”

And there you have it: Americannibals!

Reading this back years later, two things stand out to me.

One, I think it holds up quite well. It’s a solid story and—while your mileage may vary on the black humor of it all—even the art, crude as it is, serves the comic (in both senses of the word) proceedings well.

Two—and this was something I was worried about, having written and drawn it as an atheist and returning to and re-reading it now as a Christian—for all its blood and guts and amoral and immoral characters, it’s surprisingly…well, not moral, obviously, though there is a moral in there: don’t be a cannibal. Which should be so obvious that it sounds kind of silly, but in our sick society…? I suspect there’s more than a few Reeds and Boones out there who can justify any sort of evil, so long as there’s “consent” and “no one gets hurt.”

The lack of profanity is also noteworthy. I’m not really sure why I didn’t have the characters drop any of the f-bombs or casual blasphemies so common in current banter. Maybe I wanted them to come across as somewhat squeaky clean as a stark contrast to the sick insanity of their quest? I surely didn’t hold back in that regard in some of my other comics. Interesting!

The original idea for Americannibals! came about from an in-joke with one of my friends. There was an exotic meats store near us that we went to on a lark, and my buddy joked that he was going to ask the guy behind the counter, “Where do you keep the good stuff?”—hint hint ha ha—and thus a premise was born and the story and characters spun out of that. For the record, I think the most “exotic” meat I ever tried was alligator, which tastes exactly how you might expect: swampy chicken.

Another source of inspiration for this story was the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, both in its general comedic premise of sociopathic people acting outrageously with zero self-awareness (it often gets referred to as Seinfeld on crack) and one episode in particular, “Mac & Dennis: Manhunters,” in which two of the cast members develop a craving for (what they think is) human flesh. Hilarity ensues. I remember rewatching this episode before finalizing the script to Americannibals! just to make sure I wasn’t accidentally ripping it off, but the only real overlap is that both contain scenes where characters try to get human meat from the morgue—but hey, wouldn’t everybody think to do that?

As you probably already noticed if you’re enough of a horror hound, the various members of the Carnivore Club each personify a different subgenre of flesh-eating horror:

• Wild Wilmer for hillbilly horror (The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre)

• The Gentleman for suave psychopaths like Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter or American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman (with a hint of giallo)

• The Girl with the Skin Condition for zombies (Night of the Living Dead, et al)

• The Man with the Face Paint and Filed-Down Teeth (I couldn’t come up with a better name?) for savage jungle flicks like Cannibal Holocaust and The Green Inferno

So yeah: a very self-aware story about very un-self-aware people!

I have fond memories working on this—the story existed in my head for a few years before it made its way onto paper, so it was satisfying to finally release it into the wild. The fact that I still like it, despite having previously disowned it, makes that one missing page all the more painful. I don’t see any other way of retrieving it, though, as (in addition to deleting the blog) I also threw away all the original artwork.

Still, it’s a blessing that it survived at all (and if one page did have to go missing…it could’ve been worse).

Anyway, thanks for taking this walk down memory lane with me. I hope I didn’t scare you off (or gross you out…too much). Next time I’ll dissect the other of my two one-shots—Night of the Sleepwalkers—which sounds like another work of horror but is, at most, horror-adjacent.