Writer and artist unknown.
Published by H. T. Philbrick Associates in 1983. Biotech Comix is their only known publication so far as I am able to determine.
Available on the Internet Archive.
. . .
“Oh hell. I’m sick of e.coli and selective anthrax. What I want is a really good lover . . .”
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Here we have an anonymous comic book-Biotech Comix-with no credited author or artist. I would like to tell you that I found it out in the wild in a quarter or dollar bin, but that’s not what happened. I found it looking through the Internet Archive’s scans of various obscure comic books. I prefer to read physical copies of printed works, but I’ve gotten used to reading things on a screen. I still have that twinge of desire for an actual book in my hands, but it’s not an overriding lust as it used to be. I grow more accustomed to my existence as an extension of online platforms by the day. So it goes.
As for Biotech Comix itself, it contains two stories: the one page curtain raiser “Sordophage” and the thirty page main story “Biotech Comix.”
“Sordophage” is a mock advertisement aimed at housewives for a self-replicating enzyme called Sordo that promises empowerment even within the confines of wifely duties. Now, you can clean those fucking dishes faster, which will leave you more time for other shitass forms of domestic drudgery. Truly revolutionary. It’s a sketch comedy level spoof on a well worn cliche of advertising campaigns which condescend to women by speciously equating gimmicky conveniences with a vague, toothless form of pseudo-feminism. While not necessarily connected to the main story that follows, you could interpret it as functioning in a similar fashion to the Media Break segments in Robocop or commercial spoofs on Saturday Night Live or Second City TV. The last panel punchline is that the housewife is using her newfound abundance of free time to assemble what looks like a Kalashnikov assault rifle. You’re left to imagine what happens next when hubby comes home from the salt mines . . . “Honey, I’m home!” RAT-A-TAT-TAT! “Honey, I’m dead!”
“Biotech Comix” tells the story of disgruntled geneticist Dr. Victoria Topple, who works for the distinguished Stoat Skittering Institute (an obvious parody of the Sloan-Kettering Institute) in New York City attempting to cultivate strains of anthrax that target communists. Dr. Topple is bored by her research. She’s also fed-up with the mediocrity of heterosexual men, so she decides to fuck-off her assigned projects, and set her mind upon the task of using biotechnology to Frankenstein herself a dream lover. Dr. Topple wants a lover who can dance, who can cook, who can clean, and who can fuck. Dr. Topple also has a thing for panda bears. She clones the brain of a dead man from the Pathology Research Department and then proceeds to weave human neural tissue into the cells of a panda bear. After some trial and error and a lucky lightning bolt Dr. Topple has herself a keeper: a pandaman named Tom.
Dr. Topple takes Tom out on dates. At first, people gaze with perplexity and loathing upon this coupling of woman and beast, but this all changes once the ladies see how attentive, charming, and skilled Tom is as a dancer, a chef, and a lover. Dr. Topple’s girlfriends ask her how much for a pandaman of their own. The word-of-mouth is killer. Soon enough, Dr. Topple’s a millionaire off the first batch of pre-orders. She cuts ties with Stoat Skittering, and uses her riches to construct her own pandaman facility. Women all over the US abandon their human hubbies for that pandaman action. Dr. Topple institutes a sliding scale for payments so these furry lovers aren’t just for the super rich. American women leave their old lives to form a feminist breakaway republic, ditching shitty jobs and shitty men to live like Amazons in those old Wonder Woman comics. Without secretaries, nurses, teachers, research assistants, librarians, and housewives the Reaganite economy implodes, property values plummet, and the men fall ever deeper into macho paranoia and incompetence. Dr. Topple uses her economic superiority to buy Northern California, Utah, Colorado, and the failing aerospace industries. The menfolk try to use domestic violence to control the women but the pandamen just beat their asses. So, the menfolk create their very own pandawomen-but these pandawomen reject domination and instead opt to become a dangerous biker gang. The useless men resort to McCarthyite Red Scare rhetoric and militarism but only succeed in tripping over each other’s dicks as they fight over defense budget appropriations for overly complicated weapons systems of dubious functionality. Dr. Topple and her Neo-Amazons prepare for an apocalyptic showdown with the men . . . but the men end up killing each other as cooperation is sabotaged by macho territoriality.
A lot happens in Biotech Comix. It’s a sarcastic, gleeful boot up the ass of Ronald Reagan’s conservative, militaristic America. It takes the perviness one finds in, say, Robert Crumb and reconfigures it from a feminist perspective. A comics historian might fruitfully place it in some kind of relation to other adventurous anthropomorphic comics of the 1980s: Omaha the Cat Dancer, Albedo Anthropomorphics, and Usagi Yojimbo. The art is derpy looking, but the satire is delivered head-on. If the visuals had been more accomplished Biotech Comix might have caught on, but who can say.
Overall, Biotech Comix offers a perverse satirical counterattack against Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority’s mission to devalue and emiserate womankind. The visuals aren’t quite up to the ideas, but it gets the point across. The back cover promises another issue, but that might’ve been just a mockery of the endless serializations of Marvel and DC superhero soap operas. There’s just the one issue of Biotech Comix for better or worse.
And you can read it on the Internet Archive if you want. I did. It was great. It did not waste my time. Which is always nice.
