The Literary Haters Ball: Fantastic Earth Destroyer Ultra Plus

Have you ever had to suffer though a crazy person’s monologue at the bus stop? You know, when they go something like “Yeah, I was eating some cigarettes with my cousin Tutankhamen and this crazy bitch showed up with a flamethrower and asked me to give her back all her Herbie Herbster and The Disinfecting Wipes 8-tracks because she was gonna hop on her flying bicycle and visit her momma in Saturn but I jumped outta my fuzzy leather chair and kicked her ass with some of my ninja moves and shit and she ran off and now I can listen to Herbie yodeling any damn time I want!” Well, if you’re looking for the literary/visual equivalent of that, and there’s no reason in the world why you would do it but this is a world where dudes insert things in their pee holes, then snag a copy of Cameron Pierce and Jim Agpalza’s Fantastic Earth Destroyer Ultra Plus.

FEDUP (I refuse to type all that nonsense again) is the kind of mess that makes me wonder what kinds of drugs editors are ingesting these days. The plot is not a plot, it's more like a series of acid nightmares sewn together by the same character. Here’s what these fucking nutcases came up with to fill in some space on the book’s Amazon page: “In the mining town of Itchy Zoo lives a boy with pumpkin flesh. His name is Tetsuo, and he'd like to tell you about the terrible things that brought ruin to his town. How he shot his brother, how the people of Itchy Zoo became puppets, how he fell in love for the first and last time, and how Satan watched it all go down.”

Yeah, that stuff kinda happens…to a clown who has a whale for a foot. What they failed to mention is that this thing is packed with sadness and violence, and not even the good kind. There’s an ocean inside the whale, all kinds of ugly sex, and more weird stuff that I refuse to discuss here because I respect my readers. Also, Tetsuo? Really? I hope Shinya Tsukamoto sues both of these “artists” into the oblivion they deserve.

Listen, I’m all for weird. In fact, I love stories about people doing drugs and going to the mall and the occasional smart narrative about a talking penis with a twisted sense of humor. This book, however, is just too damn weird to be called anything but awful and confusing. For example, why is Tetsuo always wearing a hat? Why isn’t Satan bigger and meaner? What kind of whale grows on a foot and doesn’t complain about being stepped on all day every day? This thing makes no sense, and I think Pierce, who “wrote” this crap, and Agpalza (is that even a real last name?), the guy who illustrated this fever dream, are both major league trolls.

I was pretty mad after reading this thing, so I went to Amazon to punish these guys with a scathing 1-star review. You know what I found there? These guys had the gall to compare this garbage to Uzumaki! First of all, the Uzumaki omnibus comes in at a hefty 648 pages and has a ton of words in it. This thing is about 25 pages and contains one short sentence per page. Oh, the chutzpah these fellows possess! You won’t find a James Patterson novel that comes in at under 200 pages because Patterson delivers the goods and doesn’t skimp on words. These two should take notes from the master.

So yeah, if a really short (non)story about pure strangeness that reminds you of toothless wackos babbling at the bus stop is your thing, then throw away your money on this bizarre that should never have been published in the first place.