STUFF: THE INTRODUCTION
BY PATRICK KELLER

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When I was first asked to do the introduction to the trade paperback collection you currently hold in your hands, I was honored. What a benchmark for a career! After all, introductions are little more than thinly veiled self-congratulation and blatant ploys to attract readers with someone else's good name. Only the best and most visible get asked to write introductions. Naturally, I agreed without hesitation.

Then I read the book.

Whose idea was this? Is there some sort of paint factory giving off excessive fumes downwind from the editorial offices? Is there an Affirmative Action for the Untalented legislation that I was unaware of? Does someone have photographs of the editor snorting coke out of the asshole of a 12-year-old Mexican prostitute while firing an Uzi into a bus full of retarded kids? Was bribery involved? Can I at least get my cut?

The editor in question isn't returning my phone calls, which is understandable, since being a crack-whore-slash-comic-book-editor is one hell of a time commitment. So, contractually bound as I am, I'm forced to write this damned thing anyway, which isn't so bad. This will be at the very beginning of the book and one hopes that it will ward people off from buying it, or, forgoing that, reading it. Because reading this wretched piece of clown diarrhea caused me to have a mild aneurysm, and I lost the ability to wipe myself. I now have an inexplicable, paralyzing fear of marsupials and my own toes. Upon merely glancing at the first page, I began drooling excessively and uncontrollably, a condition that continues to this very moment, and frightens small children. I am no longer able to leave the house for fear of being stoned for my freakishness and my odor. And it hurts when I pee.

My dreams are now endless apocalyptic visions of a world ruled by the writer and artist, where every single person is tied down, their eyes taped open and forced to view their evil compositions. I fear sleep, but I also fear being awake, knowing that the world is capable of producing a book like this. I have taken to practicing trying to swallow my own tongue to end my misery.

THIS BOOK WILL GIVE YOU CANCER.

Dear God. Please put it back on the shelf. Punch the store owner in the groin for even ordering this. Burn his store down. Move to another city. I cannot stress this enough.

Not convinced? Are you a masochist? Illiterate? It doesn't matter. No one has the tolerance for this. The writing in this book is the English equivalent of falling into a vat of hydrochloric acid, which is ironic, as I don't believe that the writer even speaks English. Frankly, I'd be amazed if he even has the capacity for speech at all. Perhaps this is some sort of horrible, sadistic experiment to deprive the human race of their souls. One could invoke the old joke about the script being produced by a room full of monkeys with a typewriter, but that's an insult to monkeys, not to mention typewriters, and also assumes that monkeys not only know what evil is, but have mastered it as well.

The art appears to have been drawn, if that word can be used, after a solid month of huffing glue interspersed with bouts of hitting oneself in the head with concrete blocks. The second chapter itself is so bad it enters the realm of overachievement: No one could possibly be this bad without working at it. And then there is the section where the artist appears to have completely ignored the script (assuming he can read in the first place) and substituted abstract crayon representations of the Warrant Cherry Pie video.

However, in all honesty, the coloring isn't all that bad.

The text balloons, however, clearly illustrate the old rule about not lettering during a seizure. It's impossible to tell whether the letterer was merely following the surely diseased instructions in the script or whether he has a learning disorder that no one has told him about. Some of the dialogue in this book must have been cribbed from violent mental patients; at least the stuff that wasn't lifted wholesale from the Spanish subtitles of Road House.

Listen: THIS BOOK IS EVIL. This is my final warning. If you haven't figured it out by now, I pity you. I pity you and anyone you come into contact with. I pity your parents. I pray that the state legalizes forced sterility on those who buy this book. May God have mercy on all our souls. You're on your own.

Now, here's Archie and Pals Summer Fun Special.

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