Boody (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers is a real revelation... Boody Rogers' stories... don't seem to follow narrative structure. They're like Robert Crumb crossed with Li'l Abner. And they are amazing. This is the book to get if you think you know anything about comic book history; it will show you something you never would have thought existed. (Paul Constant - The Stranger )

Boody's absurdism is patently blue-collar. There is nothing heady or cynical or mean-spirited in these strips. They owe far more to the tradition of wives tales and folk legends than Kafka. As their syndication would likely demand, Boody’s bizarre comics are Golden Age nuggets of an off-kilter author who found a particular release in his medium. (Erik Hinton - PopMatters )

A 144-page whopper, rich in humor and dreamlike oddities. (Michael H. Price - Fort Worth Business Press )

Boody Rogers’s work was and is a visual storm front that keeps you turning pages. I only wish our more legitimate fine art doyens and high cultured dictators of today could bring themselves down to this level of imaginative epiphany. (Robert Williams, artist and author of Malicious Resplendence and Hysteria in Remission )

Funny with a touch of madness. (The Onion A.V. Club )

If Hanks’s stories were fascinating for their anger, lunacy, and wild urgency, then these rediscovered gems are a revelation for being every bit as strange, but seemingly on purpose. It’s akin to David Bowie coming along and taking the unstoppable id of The Ramones and The Stooges and crafting something much more complex and layered... Get it together, America.  Check out this strange book and dare to dream, one last time, because dark days are ahead, and when the bullets start flying you’ll wish you spent more time laughing. (Tom Batten - Brick Weekly )

If anyone is a comic-book pioneer, it’s Boody Rogers. (Gordon Flagg - Booklist )

Nearly everyone who’s come across his work had come away an admirer…Boody Rogers's comics are truly unlike anything else. (Michael C. Lorah - Newsarama )

Publisher Fantagraphics has restored the color and images to its typical standards of quality...not to mention standards of unapologetic weirdness. (The Oklahoma Gazette )

Rogers defiantly was ahead of his time, demonstrating more zeal for the medium than much of his contemporaries. (Rod Lott - Bookgasm )

This is one of the funniest comics I’ve ever read, and all I do is read comics…Just looking at his drawings makes me laugh…This book is essential. Get it or get out. (Nick Gazin - Vice )

[Rogers’s] imagination was clearly light year beyond many of his contemporaries…a cartoonist’s cartoonist. (Brian Heater - The Daily Cross Hatch )

Product Description

You've met Fletcher Hanks. Now meet Boody Rogers! Fans of Boody Rogers' Golden age comic-book stories span generations of cartoonists, from Robert Williams to Art Spiegelman to Johnny Ryan. Spiegelman printed Rogers' work in RAW magazine and recently it also appeared in the anthology book Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries (Abrams). Here at last is a single book - Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers - devoted to this cult comics hero, collecting Roger's best Sparky Watts , Babe and Dudley stories, as well as much more. This beautifully designed tome also has tons of vintage photos and unpublished art (including art from the first modern newsstand comic book that Rogers did in 1935). It all begins with a career spanning fun and fascinating interview with the late Rogers, by editor Craig Yoe (Arf).

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Product Details

• Paperback: 124 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (March 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560979615
• ISBN-13: 978-1560979616
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #85,296 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reality Jolt, May 14, 2009

By	Norm Knott (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The whacky weird world of Boody Rogers, April 23, 2009

By	Diego Cordoba - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!!!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but incomplete overview of a comics wildman, April 29, 2009

By	Christopher Barat (Owings Mills, MD, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.