Shredded Moose (2007-2009) was one of those comics that really divide their audience. Approximately 65% of people who read it flew into all-consuming fits of rage, 20% were more confused than angry, 14% experienced overwhelming, abject fright, and the remaining 1% went insane. This last percent, as you will see, included at least one of the creators.
SM started out as a Penny Arcade ripoff that featured two “gamers” commenting on video games and pop culture. In the case of Shredded Moose, our “heroes” are a frat boy called “Brew” and an introverted kid called “Trip” – the alter egos of author Chris Hall and artist Brian Krümm, respectively.
What set the strip apart from others of its ilk was its rampant, downright psychotic display of contempt for women. At this point, it unfortunately becomes necessary to give an example.
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| I am so, so sorry. |
For most of its run, Shredded Moose couldn’t go two strips without demeaning women. Preferably in ways that gave opportunity to draw them naked. Not always, though, these guys were versatile:
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Wait, which of these two women are supposed to have an absurd anatomy?
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Shredded Moose took the bold position that only two things in this world are truly funny: belittling women and grotesque violence. This resulted in more than a few strips that, to most people, didn’t actually contain anything recognizable as “humor”.
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| The joke is that it hurts. |
The comic also attempted to be political. Mostly by trying to bash feminists.
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The joke is that… Feminists are ugly? Is that the joke? Is there something I’m not seeing?
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And occasionally, Christians.
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The joke is that… Uh… I give up.
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Bad Webcomics Wiki theorizes that Chris Hall was the most closeted homosexual in the entire history of sexuality and furniture, trying to cope by creating a self-insert character who fucks all the women, but also demeans them because deep down he hates doing it. That analysis is both unfair to gay people, and also overthinking things: the guy was a crazy douchebag, end of story.
However, during 2008 Hall went markedly crazier. Shredded Moose experienced what is commonly known as the cerebus syndrome, wherein a comic starts to take itself too seriously, but by doing so becomes ridiculous or straight-up offensive. Since Shredded Moose was already as offensive as you can get, it just got more ridiculous.
Shredded Moose decided that it should have a plot. And what a plot it was: The story became increasingly incoherent and complex, by the end involving an otter-humping cyborg pirate, a complex conspiracy to kill Brew, a furry assassin, and a group of child molesters among whom were a Jewish stereotype and a Mark Twain lookalike. The latter turned out to be Brew’s evil dad in disguise. Who again turned out to be a vampire, because fuck sanity at this point.
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| Don’t worry. It doesn’t make sense in context either. |
The most unbelievable thing about the plot was that Brew grew a girlfriend: a strawman feminist named Monique, probably a disrespectful nod to Sinfest’s character ofthe same name.
Don’t think that made the rampant misogyny end, though.
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You thought the bit about “punching a woman in the vagina”
was hyperbole, didn’t you? Naïve fool. |
Toward the end, the artwork went into decay as well. As to why, there is no shortage of theories being spread about: some say Krümm quit in disgust, others say he broke his arm, others again claim Hall couldn’t pay him to draw anymore… Who knows. In any case, the art was reduced to stuff like this:
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| You did what, Chris? What did you do? |
And then, in 2009, the strips suddenly just stopped coming. The almost-as-awful blog posts that accompanied them likewise came to halt. Finally, “Brew” took down the entire archive of strips and announced that he was putting Shredded Moose on “hiatus”, which is webcomic speak for “my horrible comic has finally taken a stake to the heart and is never coming back to haunt the internet again”.
Brian Krümm moved on. He became – of all things - a successful children’s books illustrator. I imagine he does not put Shredded Moose on his resume.
In fact, Krümm’s work since Shredded Moose is the kind of stuff that would probably make Brew tear off both Trip’s arms in a blind fit of fury: it includes stuff like an environmentalist story called “Eartha the Sea Turtle”; another story book aimed at "enforcing a strong identity and pride in young Sikh children"; a Latin-American eco-friendly superhero called “Eco Enrico”; and this.
Things related to Shredded Moose should not be allowed to come any closer than three clicks to the adorable picture of cutesy, multi-ethnic children in that last link. And yet, here we are.
As for the writer, Chris “Brew” Hall has become as elusive as the missing half of the Shredded Moose archives. Nobody seems to know what became of him, although there is no lack of theories. There are two photos circulating on the web that are supposed to be him, but honestly, are these two guys even the same person?
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Left: Drunken manchild. Right: Mormon with a secret.
Middle: The clown statue that would tell Chris Hall what to write after being given sacrifices of porn mags and raw meat. |
Whatever may have happened to Hall, he never hired a new artist to draw comics for him. And there ends the saga of Shredded Moose.
