Holed Up is a three issue miniseries by Rich Johnston, which is an interesting concept to start with.  In fact, Johnston's been doing comics on and off for years, but this is far and away his most high profile work.

Avatar Press, bless 'em, are probably about the only publisher anyone's heard of who would touch a Rich Johnston comic with a radioactive bargepole.  Most of the rest of them would rather see him strung up - and even if Holed Up was by somebody else, it's fairly safe to say that most American publishers would reject it on grounds of taste.  Such considerations have never troubled Avatar, which has led them over the last few years to publish a lot of rather good comics that larger publishers baulk at.  (And, of course, a lot of dreadful crap as well.)

The basic joke of Holed Up is that it's a book about a happy sitcom family who just happen to be survivalists, gun freaks, and right-wing nuts.  Johnston's compared it to The Addams Family, which sums it up rather neatly.  They're a blissfully nuclear family, save that they're all completely insane, live in an utterly insane subculture, and seem totally oblivious to their own oddities.  They're clearly murderous lunatics, but any dark undercurrents are balanced by the sense that they live in a Loony Tunes world where you can shoot people in the head and they probably bounce back up.

It's a gleefully demented and shamelessly offensive comic, which at times seems to be deliberately baiting controversy.  Of course, survivalists and militia types are a barn door target - and by going as insanely over the top as he does here, Johnston's really working in the sort of territory that's perhaps more suited to one or two page strips in Viz.  Despite the vestige of a plot, that's effectively what Johnston is producing here - a string of gags around the theme.

It's a one joke premise, but it holds up surprisingly well, with a mixture of daft sight gags and warped logic that moves into slightly more satirical territory.  There's a particularly neat gag with the father telling his bemused kids that guns are not toys, only for the rest of the family to argue that Oh Yes They Are.  And in warped kind of way, they're right - if you keep a gun because you enjoy shooting ranges then, however responsibly you use it, it kind of is a toy, surely?  Oh, and there's also a fair amount of glib offensiveness, which generally works because all the characters are so insanely blase about the whole thing.

Artist Gonzalo Martinez does a fantastic job selling the sight gags, but his characters' body language is often beautifully pitched as well.  There are some great hidden sight gags in the background, and he manages to bring a bizarre sense of reality to the whole thing.

It doesn't really work as a story, which is the main problem.  The characters are just too broadly drawn to buy into the plot.  But the plot is little more than a vehicle to keep doing variations on the joke, and the joke hits more often than it misses.  A lot of people will hate the book - the survivalists it mocks, the PC lobby, 99% of the inhabitants of southern US states...  But it is genuinely funny, and while it may be aimed at a barn door target, it still hits effectively.

A lot better than I was expecting, to be honest.

Rating: A-

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