Bohda Te (one-shot)

Posted by Graig on March 22, 2008

(SLG Publishing)

I’m sure there were humorists or storytellers before Jhonen Vasquez came along that did it, but he really was my first exposure to the highly juxtaposed cutesy-horror style of comedy. Glimpses of it were in his comic Johnny The Homicidal Maniac that later featured more prominently in Squee and then hit an even broader market with his Nickelodeon cartoon series Invader Zim. If he didn’t create it, he certainly mastered the genre, the ingredients of which include, basically, horrible things happening around (or to) the widest-eyed, cutest of creatures, testing the resolve of their cuteness every step of the way. Alternatively, sometimes it’s the cutest of creatures that inflict the strangest of horrors (like the old Monty Python and the Holy Grail “killer rabbit” idea). Other sources around include Happy Tree Friends or Wonder Showzen collections on DVD, as well as other SLG published books like Lenore (written by Vasquez’s contemporary and fellow Zim writer Roman Dirge) and Bear created by Jamie Smart, who just unleashed on an unsuspecting (or, more likely, a suspecting) audience Bohda Te.

Scatological comedy is really too easy a place for any humorist to go, and typically only the laziest of funnypeople go there, but as the film The Aristocrats taught us, creativity, tone and context can really transform LCD (lowest common denominator) poo-humour into something challenging, perhaps even intellectual. I won’t go so far as to say Bohda Te is intellectual, but it’s certainly creative. Even though it completely falls in league with the Vasquez-mastered cute-horror thing (replete with the gratuitous use of the word “dookie”), which may feel derivative for some or simply wearing thin for others, Smart has done something different with this book, as if a poop-obsessed six-year-old interjected his juvenile and naive sense of what’s funny into a Lovecraft story. Bohda Te finds separate tales of a giant squid-hunting mariner, a carnivorous kitten, a pair of bumbling soldiers, an angry robot, a disturbingly cute little girl, anthropomorphic poop and a monkey all colliding in a realm of black-oozey darkness from which there is no escape… except there is… kinda.

There’s not a lot of logic to the comic, but its whimsically and gratuitously irreverent characters and story structure somehow come together to make a whole that is, if not sensical, still quite satisfying. Smart’s illustration style is cartoony with a keen design sense and very adaptable, bringing different layouts and varying levels of detail and shading to the various flashbacks and side-stories in glorious black and white with digital gray tones.

Readers keen on other of Slave Labor’s gothic-tinged humor titles will no doubt enjoy this thoroughly, and fans of the upscale vinyl figure and imported Japanese figure market will should find Smart’s visuals appealing. Me, well, the word “dooky” jusy makes me laugh.

4 out of 5 Vikings