Review -- POOP OFFICE #1

This Review Originally Ran on Comics Bulletin

Poop Office #1

(Ben Pooped; Naked Grape)

2/5 stars

Poop Office is a collection of short gag comics revolving around office politics. The hook to this book, though, is that it's a Poop Office, staffed entirely by poop. Seriously, this is a workplace farce populated by talking turds. That's right, it's a shitty Dilbert, and if I was seven years old, I might think this is THE GREATEST FUCKING THING EVER. 

But I'm not seven years old. I am a grown man of serious intent and perhaps not the target market for this crap.

For the rest of this review, I am going to refrain from spreading further fecal puns. Poop Office does enough of this. To whit: The main character, Poopert, works for Mr. Poopson at the Poop Office. They have a Poopluck lunch consisting of Pooritos and Poop Tarts, and hang around the Pee-Pee Cooler when they are not filling out Turdsheets and Poopress Reports. They have Staph Meetings where they discuss the Buttget, and, after work, they go to the bar and drink during Crappy Hour.

SERIOUSLY! This is what you get when you read Poop Office. The book even ends with a Fumetti photo comic featuring real poop. This is not highbrow. It's not even lowbrow. A matter of fact, I don't even know what this is.

I mean I know kids love their poop jokes. I remember watching my son when he was wee go into epic hysterics, red-faced, tears flowing down his eyes, with that noiseless full body convulsion laugh (the kind that, as a parent, make you worry a bit that your child has stopped breathing) when he and his friends would pontificate on matters fecal. I get that kids think this shit is funny. And so there's a niche for this crap.

My question is, though, why did Ben Pooped set his tales of turds in an office environment? I don't know about you, but I don't know very many seven year-olds holding down office jobs. Shouldn't this shit be at a school or a mall or a circus or a soccer game or something? You know, a place where seven year-olds actually are? A place they can relate to?

Or is Ben Pooped doing something subversive here. Is he making a larger social commentary? Is he setting kids up to believe that only shits work in a corporate environment? Or is he telling those adults who are already working in the daily grind of an office that ultimately they are nothing but turds in the bowl, ready to be flushed away in the name of larger profits and shareholder whims? Is Poop Office actually a scathing condemnation of Capitalist doctrine where workers trade their labor for the opportunity to be digested back into the system and shat out only to repeat the process once more?

Is Poop Office a modern take on the absurdity of the bureaucratic system inherent in a top down profit seeking corporate structure where people are stripped of their individuality to the point where they constantly exist in such a perpetual state of self-loathing that they become nothing more than talking turds? Has Ben Pooped written a 21st century update of Kafka's Metamorphosis? Is Poopert the Gregor Samsa of 2013?

Perhaps I've underestimated Poop Office. Perhaps this is social satire writ large, a Gulliver's Travels of our time?

Or maybe it's just a crappy comic full of puerile humor about talking turds working in an office.

Yeah. It's probably just that. Fuck that shit.

- You can buy Poop Office from Comixology.