The art of crude, illustrated insults captured in beautifully puerile new book

One of the lesser-mentioned aspects of social media is its tendency to bring out people’s puerile side – you only have to see the hilariously juvenile status updates people feel duty-bound to add if their friend leaves a Facebook account open.

Elevating this kind of thing to an artform though takes something special, so enter illustrators Jonny Ryan and Frederic Fleury or “two of our civilisation’s most distinguished assholes” as the press release for their new book puts it.

The pair started posting crude and offensive drawings on each other’s Facebook walls and it escalated from there over the course of six months because: “tTey are both proud young men and also profoundly disturbed in their brains.”

But because the duo have such pedigree – Jonny is the creator of Prison Pit, Blecky, Yuckerella and Angry Youth Comix and Frederic founded Frederic magazine – these doodled disses were too good not to share with a wider audience. So The Milan Review has collected them together and published War & Penis, 140 pages of obscene trans-Atlantic visual insult-mongering.

If you’re in the mood for something highbrow this morning you might want to give this a miss (similarly some bits might be NSFW) but as a celebration of our basest, most childish instincts, and the ingenuity of thinking up and illustrating creative insults, this takes some beating.

Oh and the book also comes with either an America Wins! or France Wins! cover so you can nail your colours to the mast.