MICHAEL H. PRICE: The Long Shadow of Boody Rogers
People and events of consequence cast their shadows before them, never behind. Oklahoma-born and Texas-reared Gordon “Boody” Rogers (1904 – 1996) owns one of those forward-lurching shadows – an unlikely mass-market cartoonist whose oddball creations anticipated the rise of underground comics, or comix, and whose command of dream-state narrative logic and language-mangling dialogue remains unnerving and uproarious in about equal measure.
I had discovered the artist’s more unsettling work as a schoolboy during the 1960s, via the used-funnybook bin of a neighborhood shop called The Magazine Exchange. One such title, Babe, amounted to such an exaggerated lampoon of Al Capp’s most celebrated comic strip, Li’l Abner, as to transcend parody. (One lengthy sequence subjects a voluptuous rustic named Babe Boone to a gender-switch ordeal that finds her spending much of the adventure as Abe Boone – almost as though Capp’s Daisy Mae Scragg had become Abner Yokum.) Such finds drew me back gradually to Rogers’ comic-strip and funnybook serial Sparky Watts, a partly spoofing, partly straight-ahead, heroic feature about a high-voltage superman.
Rogers resurfaced in my consciousness quite a few years later. A college-administration colleague showed up one day around 1980 sporting a canvasback jacket adorned with cartoons bearing an array of famous signatures – Al Capp and Zack Mosely and Milton Caniff among them. The garment proved to be one-of-a-kind.
“Oh, it’s my Uncle Gordon’s,” my co-worker explained. “Kind of a family heirloom, I guess – something his cartoonist pals fixed up for him on the occasion of his retirement. He lends it out to me, now and then.”
Okay, then. And who is this “Uncle Gordon,” to have been keeping company amongst the comic-strip elite?
“Oh, you’ve probably never heard of him,” she said. “He was a cartoonist, his ownself. Went by the name of ‘Boody.’”
Not Boody Rogers?(Yes, and how many guys named Boody can there be, anyhow?)
“None other. So maybe you have heard of him?”
Well, sure. Used to collect his work, to the extent that it could be had for collecting in those days of catch-as-can trolling for out-of-print comic books and newspaper-archive strips.
So, uhm, then, he’s a local guy?
“Well, not exactly right here in town,” answered my colleague. “But he lives not far from here” – here being Amarillo, Texas, in the northwestern corner of the state – “over to the east. Do you ever get over to Childress? You ought to drop over and meet him.”
When I was a teenager, the environment of my hometown became poisonous. To save me, my parents sent me to an alien environment that seemed to be a universe away, filled with people so different from me they might have been a different species altogether. No one knew anything about my home, nor about my people’s civilization and customs. Instead, I had to hide my true self until I understood how I fit in and what I had to offer the strangers with whom I lived.-100.jpg)
Much as the crime melodrama had helped to define the course of cinema – especially so, from the start of the talking-picture era during the late 1920s – so Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy proved a huge influence upon the comic-strip industry, beginning in 1931. It was something of a foregone conclusion that the paths of Tracy and the movies should intersect, and none too soon.
As we pack out bags for The Mighty Pittsburgh Comicon, help us clean off the news desk with stories ranging from Elvis to Stan Lee’s fetish to yet more second printings and amazing ticket sales for Spider-Man 3! We prime you for the Big Convention, tell you where the Martain Manhunter will be popping up, review the return of Heroes and trip back to when Steely Dan managed to irk a nation of football fans.
Newsstand distributors have released some misprinted copies of Iron Man #16, wherein pages are printed out of order. Expect to see these on eBay shortly going for far more than their worth by any objective measure.
Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing (who’s 
Man – make 
