The Bogie Man only has one joke. Granted, it is a pretty funny joke; maybe even enough to pull over and over again across several miniseries.
Originally published through the independent Fat Man Press, the series, by Judge Dredd regulars John Wagner and Alan Grant artist Robin Smith 1, concerns a Scottish mental patient 2 who is convinced he is Humphrey Bogart. Or rather, he is every single role Bogart played as well as the public perception of him as ultimate tough guy and cynical operator.
Escaping into 1990 Glasgow, just as the city was crowned European City of Culture, he gets involved with all sort of low-rent criminal shenanigans while imagining he is part of something far grander and cooler. A shipment of stolen turkeys becomes a conspiracy involving multiple Maltese Falcons. An attempt to shake down local Chinese restaurants becomes a nefarious "oriental" plot 3. There have been four long storylines, [ efn_note]The second storyline actually exists in two competing versions – having begun serialization in the defunct alternative comics magazine Toxic! with artist Cam Kennedy before Robin Smith made his objection to a different artist loud and clear. The story ended up being completed and redrawn by Smith, and published through Tundra.[/efn_note] three of them collected in this recent Kickstarter Project, alongside a new six-page short, thus the name The Incomplete Case Files.
Note: Since the project was kickstarter exclusive, getting your hands on this particular edition outside the United Kingdom might be a problem, though you can pick up a digital version at the official Bogie Man website, and several comics shops across the pond do deliver.
The choice not to publish The Manhattan Project storyline because it's “both in color and somewhat dated” (lots of Dan Quayle jokes) is both understandable (the rest of the stories are in black and white and adding color is probably expensive for such a Kickstarter project) and bizarre (it’s not like the rest of the stories are particularly timely – what would readers of today even make a of a plot to steal video cassettes?). Still, the book exists as is, probably the best way to get all the stories without bin diving and internet-hunting, and it’s a pretty good package.
Smith is an interesting choice as an artist for this project. Not a natural comedy-artist, his extremely well rendered illustrations of Glasgow could come of any straight-faced noir story, which ends up for the best: The joke sells a lot better when the Bogie Man is drawn like he’s a part of a classic mystery while around him people engage in their daily shenanigans. The art is beautiful to look at, heavily detailed (especially the cityscapes) without overwhelming the story. It makes you wish Smith had a few more swings at the comics bat.
It’s especially interesting to compare it to the attempt by Cam Kennedy to tell the same story, Kennedy is a more exaggerated and "shaggy" artist and his character design push the joke forward more forcefully. Part of the success of The Bogie Man comes from tension between the art and the scripting, Kennedy’s version seems more in synch with the joke which, counterintuitively, makes it less funny 4.
I wrote that The Bogie Man only has one joke, the expected clash between 1940s Hollywood make-believe and 1990s reality, but the reason it works is because of the specificity. It’s not only about the difference between "then" and "now," it’s also about the difference between "there" (USA) and "here" (Glasgow). The Bogie Man, though obviously not right in the head, has the strange ability to pull normal people into his orbit by sheer insistence and force of personality. A typical framing of the brash American in a foreign scenery only dialed up to 11, not just a tourist but an actual icon of Americana. Except, of course The Bogie Man is Scottish.
Between all the expected gags of clashing accents (for the untrained there is a “Glasgow Glossary” at the end of the book) and local-criminal hubris straight out of a Coen Brothers feature, there is an actual attempt to navigate that moment in Scotland when it was meant to be a European Capital of Culture while it was, in words of the forward by Gordon Rennie, the place with “the lowest life expectancy rates in Western Europe.” There’s a comparison between the illusion the Bogie Man suffers to that of the rest of the city. They all, the story seems to say, believe they are something that they can’t be.
The local crime boss plays at being a big man, while being cowed by his wife and the limitations of his hired hands. A pair of star-crossed lovers try to wed against the wishes of their families, and find out reality doesn’t have to be tragic to be unfortunate. Everybody is playing a character in their own life. It’s just the Bogie Man who is a method actor. He's so committed to his own delusions he can sell them to almost anyone else. Which is to say, he’s America personified.
The first story, simply the titled “The Bogie Man,” is the best of the lot, if for no other reason than because the joke is still fresh and Wagner, Grant and Smith can find plenty of tiny variations on it to cause actual laughter. Bogie’s constant attempt to justify why a bunch of frozen turkeys are actually important McGuffins causes him to run through a bunch of implausible stories until he finds one to his liking. It’s interesting that the story isn’t afraid to make the title character downright terrifying in his delusions, even the proud "hard men" of Glasgow crime treat him like a violent aberration, rather than a delusional naïf. Or maybe not so surprising considering these are the people behind Judge Dredd.
It’s certainly an aspect that has aged well. Bogie Man seems, today, very much in the mold of a conspiracy theorist, a person who isn’t going to let something as minuscule as facts stand in the way of his point of view. Once he has decided he’s in The Maltese Falcon or Casablanca he’ll interpret every new piece of information as supportive of his theory; and as giving him absolute moral license to be as violent as he likes (again, a very British view of Americans).
After that there’s a subtle, but noticeable, decline. “Chinatoon” tries to shake things up with bigger comedic elements up front – an unexplained ninja who keeps jumping at characters mid-plot – but without the element of surprise of the first story, at this point it seems all of Glasgow is aware of our guy, and it stays decidedly within the realm of culture-clash jokes. At four chapters it feels like a stretch, especially since the creators involved are known for their ability to wrap things up in seven pages or less. The third and final story, “Return to Casablanca” seemed resigned to the fact that there isn’t much else to do with the concept at this point, bringing back old characters and old gags. It’s just amusing, while the first series was genuinely funny.
Maybe it’s all due to the unwillingness to tangle with the passage of time. The first Bogie Man stories are children of the nineties, and they draw their power from the exploration of that time and place. “Return to Casablanca” came out in 2005 (serialized in the pages of Judge Dredd the Megazine) but it doesn’t feel particularly contemporary, as if it could’ve come out at any time after the publication of the first story. Nothing changes, and so nothing feels particularly relevant.
Still, there are worst ways to pass a Saturday night. There’s something charmingly durable about this collection. Maybe it’s better the color story is missing, not because it’s ‘irrelevant,’ but because the story should be in black in white. Bogie was in black and white after all, which made him immortal. Colors fade, colors are changed in reproduction, colors go in and out of style. Not the Bogie Man though, for all his faults – he is always in style.
The post The Bogie Man: The Incomplete Case Files appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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