In what has to be the most ill-advised release in comic book history, Image Comics unleashes a tale of an ugly kid who is mistakenly accused of being a child killer. Even if the entire Connecticut massacre hadn’t happened, Todd, The Ugliest Kid On Earth would be a monument to bad taste that few could beat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not prude against off color humor or even bad taste but this, this isn’t even smart enough to be funny.
The hilarity kicks off right at the beginning when a young Asian girl is playing with her dolls. The dolls are engrossed in a conversation about how the female doll can’t marry the male doll because he doesn’t make enough money. The male doll then begs her by saying he’s better than that, that he has aspirations. Get it? The little girl is using big words to describe how shallow the dolls are. Wow, what a great little exposition on the way life is.
Cue Todd, who is so ugly he wears a bag over his head. Todd has no friends so he approaches the new girl in town in hopes of having just one. Nope, because the continued comedy arrives in the form of the neighborhood bullies, who tell the Korean girl they like her because they like “Jap Cartoons.” Wait, though, it gets better. The bullies’ superglue the two dolls into a sexual position and then blame Todd when his abusive shrew of a mother appears. The ugly kid with the abusive mom? How original. Wait, wait, it is more original than Todd’s beer swilling abusive dad.
Todd wanders outside where he meets the child killer. From there, Todd The Ugliest Kid On Earth just gets worse. A massively stupid cop who tries to arrest his own daughter because she’s playing with the stuck-together dolls the Asian girl had. Oh, right, forgot to tell you, the Asian girl got her head chopped off by the serial killer. The cherry on the parfait of this entire debacle is that Todd gets arrested for killing the Asian girl.
The mind boggles.
Writer Ken Kristensen is trying to create a Goon-like hyper-realistic world and he utterly fails at it. Remove the sheer bad taste of this title and you’re left with writing that’s not funny and a story that tries so hard to be shocking that it completely runs off the rails. Not helping the situation is the wanna-be Mad Magazine art from MK Parker. The work is sloppy, uninspired and an amalgam of about twenty other artists who’ve done this kind of Eerie Magazine era art much better.
Todd, The Ugliest Kid On Earth is awful. Don’t just skip it. Burn it.
