Customer Reviews

Boody

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The roiling, anything-goes "Golden Age of Comics" is best known for introducing and developing the superhero genre, but the medium was so fluid at that time that literally any sort of subject matter was fair game, provided that audiences liked it. Humor comics flourished in the years after World War II, and, in their zeal to get readers' attention, publishers weren't averse to taking walks on the weird, wild side and employing stylists whose over-the-top gags and broad drawing styles would probably not have passed muster in the more cautious post-Comics Code days. Basil Wolverton (POWERHOUSE PEPPER) is probably the best known of these genial nutcases. This volume introduces modern readers to a second likable loony: Gordon "Boody" Rogers. Of this gentleman, I previously knew only that he created Sparky Watts, the first true parody of Superman, and was the leading assistant to Zack Mosely on the comic strip SMILIN' JACK. After digesting this brief collection of examples of each of Rogers' major features -- and "major" is stretching things some, given that even Sparky Watts had a career that lasted less than a decade and was interrupted due to Rogers' service in World War II -- a few additional questions have been answered, at least... but not enough to give this volume the high rating it otherwise might have merited.

One reviewer of BOODY strafed editor Craig Yoe for a fanboyishly dizzy introduction that gave Rogers' biography short shrift -- a bit of a surprise considering Yoe's obvious enthusiasm for Rogers' work and self-proclaimed diligence at digging up data. (I myself picked up at least one error of fact: Carl Ed was the creator of HAROLD TEEN, not SMITTY, which was drawn by Walter Berndt.) At the very least, we should have been provided with a basic bibliography of Rogers' comic-book work. Unfortunately, sloppy, breathless writing is the least of Yoe's sins here. Take Sparky Watts, the bespectacled, casually dressed mock superhero... who is featured in several stories herein but does not get a chance to perform any superheroics. I'd call that a major omission, wouldn't you? Instead, we get to see him lose his mysterious powers and shrink (!) due to the wearing-off of the "cosmic rays" that are the source of whatever abilities he may happen to possess. The resulting antics are funny -- ant-sized Sparky survives encounters with some truly bizarre insect life and barely avoids getting married to a two-headed, half-bug-half-babe (would I make this up?) -- but c'mon, Craig, surely we could have been treated to at least one little fantastic feat, in order to give the un-powered Sparky's adventures in bug-land a little more context? The last SPARKY story, a two-parter, features Sparky and his pal Slap Happy in a supporting role to two pairs of animate legs and feet who fall in love and get married. Sparky and Slap might just as well have been Sam and Silo (cf. my previous review) for all they contributed to this story. If Fantagraphics wants to follow up this collection with another bundle of "Boody" boodle, I have a mild suggestion: publish a volume devoted entirely to Sparky, so that we can actually see what makes him tick, as opposed to getting ticked off at not finding out more about the character.

The volume does a little better by BABE, "The Amazon of the Ozarks," whose origin story and its follow-up appear herein. Unfortunately, the two stories are split up at opposite ends of the book and really should have been printed back-to-back. The influence of LI'L ABNER on this fanciful scenario of a female hillbilly who's part super-athlete and part "eternal innocent" is obvious, but Rogers' Ozark setting is far weirder than Al Capp's ever was, including, among other things, a "table mountain" that's home to a group of male centaurs who get their kicks by racing comely females as if they were horses. This scenario is disturbing enough, but just as skin-crawling is the brief tale in which Babe performs as a female wrestler and has her neck broken. She spends the last page or so of the story with her head canted back at an impossible angle -- and no, there's no deus ex machina to make it all better at story's end. The reader apparently had to assume that Babe's neck would heal up by the time the next issue appeared (and since this only appeared in issue #4 of an 11-issue run, at least she got the chance to recover!).

A few additional stories from a teenage comic, DUDLEY, are thrown in to help the volume make weight, though additional SPARKY WATTS stories would probably have been a better choice. The DUDLEY story, chock full of antiquated "hepcat" slang, is pretty lively and amusing, though nowhere is it made clear exactly which of the characters is Dudley. It's reasonably easy to figure it out in context, but, to me, it's another example of careless editing. JASPER FUDD, a "filler" story about a clod-hopper country boy who doubles as an inexplicably fast cross-country runner, is the most "normal" story in the issue, and, as such, is the story that should probably have been chucked in favor of more zany fare.

Rogers left comics after 1950, and probably just in time; though there's nothing truly offensive herein, his extreme caricatures, "scary" creatures, and occasional forays into realms of "iffy" taste (cf. the BABE story in which a famous actor cross-dresses and escapes to Babe's town to dodge his adoring fans) would have been a much harder sell after the Comics Code crackdown. I liked this material enough to want to see more of it, but the next Rogers collection should receive somewhat soberer treatment, at least when it comes to ancillary material.

If you need a shot of bizarre in your life, the work of Boody Rogers will overflow your hypo. Beautifully crafted and rendered stories with an imagination from another dimension. They ain't nobody like Boody.

Absolutely fascinating and absolutely whacky and weird, Boody Rogers comes out as a sort of a cross between Tex Avery, Basil Wolverton, Dali and Will Elder. A very surrealistic artist, if ever there was one, and also one of the most hilarious.

The book reprints some of Rogers' comic stories just the way they looked like in the late 40's, with the original ben-day coloring process used in those days. Even the cover seems to be aged and dated with it's faux creases and torn spine and badly printed colors (don't worry, this is just a printing illusion as the cover is in perfect state and sturdy as are the interior pages which are thick and clean; this book will last for an eternity). Absolutely fabulous. Though I agree that a better input on the artist himself would have made this a truly cult item. Who was Boody Rogers and how come we have never heard of him before?

Kudos to Craig Yoe and Fantagraphics for bringing us this blast from the past, and here's hoping for many more books like this.

Very highly recommended!!!

I am in complete agreement with the 2009 3-star review by Christopher Barat.

What's notably missing from this book are a table of contents, page numbers, original publication dates of the material, a timeline of Boody Rogers works and some sort of overview or bibliography of his work.

That said, I'd never heard of Boody Rogers before coming across this volume, and I found it worth reading. The word "Bizarre" in the title is a very accurate description -- some stories border on the perverse. Many of the stories feel like a cross between mainstream comics and underground comics, and the material is part Al Capp and part Basil Wolverton.

This book collects some comic books written and drawn by Boody Rogers between 1948 and 1950. These are all humor comics and they are strange but funny. The main characters here are Babe (a hillbilly girl) and Sparky Watts (a superpowered guy). There are also a couple of "teenage" comics included. Boody Rogers was a true original in the field of comic books.

This is what comics need today... more stories just about imagination and having fun!

The whole dark, gritty violent tripe is way overdue to catch a boot and Boody is the perfect remedy for the occasion.

More please!

Craig Yoe has done it again: Introduced me to an amazing cartoonist whose work is new to me and made me an instant fan at the same time. Boody Rogers is not a household name, even among comics fans, but it should be and maybe now it will be.

What makes Boody's work so interesting - even important - is how he obviously influenced the underground cartoonists of the late Sixties. To say this work is bizarre is putting it mildly. When you realize that these stories were printed in newsstand comic books that sold to children for ten cents, it's even stranger. It's one thing to read a weird, outlandish story in Zap comics (intended for adults), but to come across one in a kid's comic is really incredible.

Case in point, a charmingly illustrated tale of Mrs. Two Ton Gooseflesh who has the peculiar habit of killing her husbands by cheerfully breaking their necks. She just can't stop! Or how about a cross-dressing Clark Gable character who infiltrates a hillbilly community and gets conked on the head by a miniature cave man? I'm not making this up. In one story, Babe, a sexy Daisy Mae type, discovers a race of centaurs in a hidden mountain retreat who ride women like they were horses. Then there's Sparky Watts, a kinda sorta super-hero who keeps shrinking down to insect size when he doesn't want to, and then visits a carnival sideshow to meet an array of freaks worthy of Basil Wolverton. Oh yeah, one of Sparky's pals is just a hat with feet named Hattie. Bear in mind, LSD hadn't even been invented yet, so this stuff came out of Boody's imagination without chemical assistance!

If you like comics and think you've seen it all, I recommend this book highly.

This is a wonderful introduction to a comic artist I never knew about before seeing this book. I'm completely enthralled by Boody's insanely surreal, high energy stories. I can't recommend this strongly enough! And they're the kind of stories that I keep going back to and discovering they're just as good - maybe even more satisfying - on the second, third, fourth read... I'm so glad to have found this!

I first learned of Boody Rogers' comics from reprint in Art Speigleman's 'Raw Magazine' during the 1980s (the 'Babe' centaur story, which is included in this volume) I was in awe, half thinking that something this hilariously edgy must be a put-on. Surely nothing this wild came out during the 'Golden Age of Comics'. Happily I learned that this was not a hoax, but the genuine article, the work of a comic genius who created some of the best humor comics in the 1940s & 50s. Over the next decade I scoured bargain boxes at conventions eventually tracking down every issue of Babe, Sparky Watts and Dudley and not one of them let me down in the least. These comics, however, have always been pretty tough to track down, so thankfully Craig Yoe has hand picked a representative selection to introduce newcomers to one of the greatest of comicbookdom's eccentrics. My only regret is that they couldn't devote an entire volume each to Babe, Sparky Watts and Dudley (Dudley being the most conventional of Rogers' creations, though still an inventive entry to teenage comics) Perhaps someday we'll be treated to each of these characters in a solo volume of their serialized adventure absurdities, but in the meantime this collection is an absolute must-own to fans of way-out comic creators like Basil Wolverton, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Cole or George Herriman.

"Boody." (complete with inexplicable trailing period) is a great compilation of wonderful art by wacky comic genius Boody Rogers, and I'm grateful to publisher Fantagraphics and editor Craig Yoe for making it available. I'm somewhat puzzled, though, by the omission of a table of contents, and, for that matter, page numbers.

Also, I would have appreciated some info from Yoe in his foreword about the project of compiling this book; for example, how much of the available Rogers canon the book represents. If it's 100%, that explains why the two Rogers comics that were reprinted in Dan Nadel's "Art Out of Time" anthology are also present here. If not, then there's no excuse for the redundancy, as most fans are likely to buy both collections, I think.