Cartoonist Alec Robbins is married to classic cartoon pinup Betty Boop and they’re madly in love with one another. They also can’t stop having orgies with the likes of Bugs Bunny and Peter Griffin. Then Sonic the Hedgehog gets jealous and tries to assassinate Alec. You know - that hoary old canard!
So yeah, Mr Boop is a bit of a strange comic - it was apparently popular enough to run for four books, all of which are collected in this edition, though I’d never heard of it before - that turns out to be also actually kinda funny but also one-note, repetitive, and inconsistently interesting.
The four-panels-a-page strips aren’t funny in a laugh-out-loud way but I did appreciate how silly it is - characters literally saying the most silly things, or deliberately corny punchlines, very earnestly - and it is imaginative at times. The direction the fourth and final book takes is especially creative.
But the constant sex - none of which is graphic; it’s all off-page/insinuated - and the weak storylines didn’t make for the most compelling of reads. Also, don’t expect the same level of art you see on the cover replicated within the book - Robbins’ interior art is less finessed than Remy Boydell’s painted cover.
The weird, repeated jokes made me think of Tim Robinson’s sketch comedy, and it turns out that Robbins was a writer on I Think You Should Leave, so if you like that kind of humour, you’ll probably enjoy Mr Boop. I thought Mr Boop was fine - a bit too long, not very substantive, but occasionally funny, surprisingly edgy in what he makes famous characters do, and sometimes the narrative contortions are quite clever.
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