Blessed Be

How wonderful – how delightful! – to run into an old friend after an extended absence. O fortuna spins over onward, and we are but fools to the whims of fate.

Here we are, however, in the year 2024, reunited with that old salt, Doofus. I’m going to be honest with you, it’s been a long time since I thought of Doofus as an ongoing concern. I really was quite a fan, you know. The Doofus Omnibus is one of my favorite books. I devoured that thing and pressed it to the people I loved, many of whom lost significant respect for me as a result. 

If you’ve never encountered Doofus! Well, that’s not completely surprising, truth be told. My man has been long absent from these climes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Doofus is about the most wretched human being you can imagine while also retaining the appearance of one of the least threatening. He’s the center of his overheated world, a generally good natured fool who is also an absolute panty-sniffing pervert who remains a virgin out of misanthropic principle. He steals panties and consorts with scoundrels and fools of the first variety. He is a menace, but he’s also got a brain the size of a goldfish, and spends most of his stories getting absolutely shit on by the world. He usually gets his just desserts. There is no point in the story in which we are ever invited to regard the man with anything but the purest revulsion. Let us imagine the most disgusting human being possible, and watch him get kicked in the nuts over and over again.

Put that little fucker in a pageboy haircut and a straw boater, watch him zoom around town in his go-cart as he drops in to pick up his porno magazines, prior to visiting his confident, Stink-Hair Stu, manager of the local Big Disgusting Burger restaurant. Let’s go. 

My favorite Doofus joke, one which remains vivid in my memory decades after first encountering it: Doofus in a wading pool, frowning. We see the hapless Henry Hotchkiss, a more pure fool than Doofus for being fool enough to admire Doofus. Hotchkiss asks, why are you so glum? To which Doofus replies, there was a mix-up at the store when he was buying beer to drink in the pool. Instead of purchasing beer he brought home a six pack of Beer Piss. He’s probably going to drink it anyway, you surmise, because he’s too lazy to get out of the pool. 

That’s the level of humor we’re dealing with here. These two reprobates live in a place called Flowertown, which doesn’t matter for the earliest Doofus strips but which is fairly closely identified as southern New England in the later material collected in Blessed Be, the new Doofus adventure, from Fantagraphics. Doofus was created by Rick Altergott, and in the endpapers he discusses the connections between Flowertown and Massachusetts, his home for the last decade and a half. Flowertown is filled with mostly terrible people, criminals and hypocrites and freaks of nature, with one or two normal souls thrown in the mix in order to be driven insane.

Altergott came of age as part of the miracle cohort of mid-'80s Cracked. In hindsight an impossibly stacked lineup of talent: veterans like John Severin, Don Martin, Steve Ditko, even Tony Tallarico, rubbing elbows with Bill Wray, Bob Fingerman, Mort Todd, Peter Bagge, and, oh yeah, Dan Clowes. Can’t forget him. That’s good company for anyone fresh off the farm. From that foundation Altergott began appearing steadily across the industry, and in some of the signature publications from the era - Lout Rampage, Duplex Planet, and Zero Zero, right before landing Doofus, his longest extended run, in the pages of the last nine out of ten issues of Bagge’s Hate. That run of strips forms the large part of the aforementioned Doofus Omnibus.

A look through the back pages reveals an enviable run by Altergott, a presence in so many significant anthologies of the period - Dirty Stories, Measles, the first Bizarro World, the infamous seventh of Kramers Ergot, even Legal Action Comics. When was the last time you thought about Legal Action Comics? That motherfucker was stacked. How would you even explain what that is to anyone under forty-five? “Sit down, son, I must explain the intimate details of a very long court case between two equally asinine people and seemingly 2/3 of the comics industry circa the first Inauguration of George W. Bush.”

How odd to think of that world as gone, even though it most certainly is. 

The last flowering of Doofus came in the pages of Raisin Pie, an intermittent periodical launched by Altergott with his wife, cartoonist Ariel Bordeaux, five issues of which saw print between 2002 and 2007. The Blessed Be story began in serial there. It wasn’t finished, although indeed, the periodical comic as an ongoing concern for independent cartoonists of Altergott’s generation was mostly a dead letter by the middle of the decade. The economy that supported pamphlets and magazines withered. Record shops were dying, head shops were long gone, and the direct market was then in the process of trying as hard as it possibly could not to choke to death on its own tongue. And it never really cared about indie periodicals to begin with. It has enough trouble selling Amazing Spider-Man.

And that’s a shame. We live in the shadow of the reality of an unending recession of the arts. Not in popularity nor utility nor even necessity, but in fact all the same. It doesn’t have to be that way forever, and given a long enough time frame it almost certainly won’t. But for the here and now cartooning is a difficult skill with which to pay the bills. 

It’s within this context that seeing Doofus resurface seems such a triumph. For whatever economic and real-life factors contributed to Raisin Pie dying after five issues, it was long enough ago to have receded into the mists of memory. Seeing that vile reprobate back for another round of abuse from the universe at large seems practically a miracle at such an interval. 

If you’re not already familiar with Doofus, at this point in the review you may be thinking, “This seems like an awful long walk for a real thin joke.” There were, to be a fair, a good number of really thin jokes that got stretched out to mixed effect across indie comics in the '90s. I want to say even Wizard thought Too Much Coffee Man was stretched pretty thin, f’instance. Evan Dorkin knew just how much Milk & Cheese material the universe needed and has stuck to his guns about it, save for the occasional commission. And, yeah, Doofus really isn’t anything outside of just watching the most awful human being you have ever seen be uncomfortably horny for the entire running time of every story. That’s the joke! There’s not really much you can do with a guy like that except drive him out to the woods and hope he gets lost.

It’s a terrible joke, clearly, but the thing is that Rick Altergott can muster a passable resemblance to Wally Wood. That’s the other half of the joke. It’s terrible. But it’s absolutely eye-popping gorgeous every step of the way.

That seems a quintessentially '90s reaction to putrefaction, taking that bone-deep Cracked ideology as your starter and going as far down the rabbit hole as it will take you – an enthusiastically shabby, grotesque, nevertheless technically backbreaking aesthetic. The Uggly Family was an influential artifact that probably should come back into print, for all it provides a focus for the direction of an entire generation of indie cartoonists. In any event, it must be stated: once you’ve got John Severin in your magazine everything else is gravy, but that was some very interesting gravy.

Now, with all that said, is Doofus sufficient to carry an extended narrative on his own back? Probably not. Blessed Be is an ensemble piece, a crime story built around the misadventures and consequences thereof not of Doofus, but of one Tommy Cottonwood, a teenage speed dealer and practicing Satanist. He gets sent up the river for a solid year and comes home ready to burn the town to ashes. These events spiral out of control and quickly implicate our pal Doofus and his sidekick, the aforementioned Henry Hotchkiss. 

The ur-narrative, for Altergott as well as many throughout his cohort of cartoonists, remains firmly entrenched in the 1970s: there’s something happening in the woods, it ain’t good, and our kids are involved. It’s a motif in Clowes up through last year’s Monica, and certainly the central setting for Burns’ Black Hole. In the age of helicopter parenting there yet remains cultural memory of a time when we didn’t know where our children were by 10 p.m. Why, they’re in the forest, screwing. 

There is a fair amount of screwing going on, it must be said, albeit thank God not for Doofus. Never for Doofus. No, he remains a steadfast member of the exclusive Forty Acres club, an exclusive society perched at the center of Flowertown. (I won’t give away the joke there because it’s a good one.) The sum total is a fair approximation of the kind of teen exploitation material familiar from the mid-to-late '70s, sure enough, Doofus remains steadfastly committed to living a Porky’s life even as the bodies start dropping and the premise begins to more resemble an early slasher film.

There’s a valedictory air to the story, especially in light of Altergott’s Afterword, wherein he explains the circuitous route taken by the story over the twenty years of its composition. It’s a road that travels from Delaware, through Philadelphia, Seattle, Providence, and Newburyport, Mass., with cameos from Bagge, Clowes, Danny Eichorn, Jim Woodring, Jim Blanchard, Ellen Forney – a whole world of cartooning talent and history, not yet gone perhaps but aged like fine wine, certainly.

Will this be the last we see of Doofus and his crew of malcontents? I dearly hope not, though I realize the miracle of a slight return shouldn’t be taken for a full reunion tour. Still: Doofus is great. Doofus is one joke, but one joke told with such delightful attention to craft, scouring the seediest facets of Wally Wood’s risqué humor oeuvre with a deadly eye for anachronistic pastiche. Is Doofus cringe? Should Doofus be canceled? The answer to both questions is almost certainly “yes, of course.” Doofus is wonderful. Doofus should run for a hundred years. 

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