Goats The Corndog Imperative is the second collection of the transcendently silly webcomic Goats, a surreal car-crash of a comic that reads like a raunchy Douglas Adams as filtered through a couple thousand Slashdot posts.
In volume two, our heroes, Jon and Phillip, two greyscale geeks from the Manhattan 3 dimension continue to suffer for the sin of killing God, turning him into a porkchop and eating him, then replacing him with Woody Allen bearing a laptop that he doesn't know how to work. First they spend an eternity in a transdimensional bar, then they are separately kidnapped by interdimensional cults who expect them to reprogram the fabric of reality to correct the Mayan 2012 date bug.
Dimension-hopping and epic, Goats veers between obscene jokes, thought-provoking philosophical rumination on the nature of reality, geek humor, and super-violent action sequences. Reading these pages, one can only conclude that Jonathan Rosenberg's browser history must be a thing of beauty to behold.
Rosenberg continues to walk the razor-edged line between silly and dumb, and does not slip onto the dumb side. Goats is recommended reading for those who believe that the universe is configurable and contingent, for those who laugh at comments in source-code, and for those who are interested in extended "farmer's daughter" jokes that turn, somehow, into jokes about the difficult business of embracing both freedom and heavy armaments.
Goats The Corndog Imperative (The Infinite Pendergast Cycle)
(Thanks to Jonathan Rosenberg for supplying a review copy of The Corndog Imperative)
