Website (for Alan Moore’s wiki page)
There’s no way I’m going to be able to talk about this one without giving out a little bit of personal history, so bear with me. Back in my youth, I had terrible taste in comics, sticking mostly with garbage Marvel superheroes. So did most of you, if you’re being honest about it. Or maybe not, as it’s never been easier to find quality comics than it is now. Anyway, eventually I started to grow out of it and look for other, better comics to take their place (giving up on comics altogether wasn’t really a consideration). I knew that THE books to get were The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, so I got them both and loved them. This led me to look for more from both authors, so I was able to get a few random old issues of Daredevil by Frank Miller and The Bojeffries Saga by Alan Moore. In hindsight this was damned odd, as he certainly had more popular and better known books out there, but I lived in a very small town and took what I could get. I’m not going to be able to get through this review without a fair amount of hyperbole, but it’s safe to say that that book influenced my sense of humor in a big way. I didn’t get the accents (Moore writes his characters in this book with heavy, thick accents that you practically have to sound out to understand), and I didn’t get a number of the references. But I could tell that it was funny, and the more universal bits made me laugh right away, so I researched the bits that I didn’t understand, which made those a whole lot funnier, until finally there was a solid decade there when I would have called it my favorite comic, even above the books that led me to it. That was longer than I intended, but you get the idea: an objective review of this comic is impossible, so what you’re getting is a subjective review, impressions that I have now after reading this again for the first time in a decade (ish) after reading it maybe a dozen times in the past. My first impression was amazement at how short the stories seem now. It seemed like every page (and damned near every panel) was crucially important at the time. But then the funny started to come at me, and large chunks of this haven’t aged a day. The opening story with the rentman was a fantastic introduction to the cast of characters, and him constantly coming up with titles to the story of his life in his head while doing his job had me laughing out loud constantly. Raoul’s Night Out, the batfishing story (and that closing line to it!), every single thing said by Ginda, the slapstick comedy of Festus dying over and over again, there’s just so much here that hasn’t aged a day. Outside of a reference or two, that is, but that’s inescapable. Finally there’s a new 24 page story to bring everybody up to date on the family, and just in case this is your first introduction to them, I won’t spoil a single bit of it. Sometimes new stories in old collections feel tacked on, but that is not the case here, as it just makes the whole thing more complete. I recommend a lot of comics, but even 20 years after seeing this for the first time, there isn’t a single comic out there that I would recommend more highly than this one. Buy it, read it, make your life better instantly. $15
