THE TEN MILLION YEAR BISCUIT

Howell’s collection of outrageous and salty comic strips lampoons pop culture.

When Colonel Sanders looks for a successor, he plants five golden tenders around the world; the winning “young-uns” who find them (and who look suspiciously like famous fast-food mascots) get the chance to tour his chicken factory and maybe steal his secret recipe (“The last stop on our tour, my favorite room, is the chicken pulp-imication radiation center”). This is just one example of the gleeful silliness found in author and illustrator Howell’s webcomic, Jolly Biscuit. This book is chock-full of comic strips, many of which are only one page long or even a mere few panels. A handful of series play out like short stories, and the book has some connecting themes, such as holidays. Some characters recur, most notably the green-headed, faceless alien Meldarn of the Z’urh Imperium and Johnny B. Nubly, Howell’s paper-bag-donning alter ego. Parodies of literature, movies, and TV shows abound; highlights include Scooby and the Mystery Gang hunting for Scooby Snacks on Dune’s desert planet, Arrakis (with other popular cartoon characters such as the Flintstones), and an unexpectedly exhilarating (and hilarious) take on Hamlet. In this collection’s titular story, which is also the longest, Indiana Jones–like Professor Turnbottom undertakes a quest to discover the mythical Jolly Biscuit bakery and the “ten million year biscuit” that reputedly grants “otherworldly abilities.” The rollicking tale features a global adventure, a variety of landscapes and climates, and the scene-stealing Junior Wut-Wut, the professor’s adolescent assistant with a perpetually stoic expression. The more compact strips have their share of memorable bits, too, including aping the form of a silent movie, a bizarrely creepy focus on spiteful dust bunnies, and an amusing play on one of Japanese artist Junji Ito’s manga tales. Howell’s artwork is colorful and cartoonish, a style that somewhat tempers the sporadic violence (bodies are ripped apart) and grotesque imagery (primarily of the scatological variety). Profanity, surprisingly, is largely absent (or, in some instances, censored).

An uproarious assembly of zany, unforgettable illustrated stories.