Mr. Boop – Volume 1: My Wife is Betty Boop (2020)

Mr. Boop is about being married to Betty Boop. The protagonist is Boop creator Alec Robbins, who is presumably not actually married to Betty Boop in real life because otherwise it’d be a series of photos not comics.

Robbins, the comic protagonist, is very happy to be married to Betty Boop, who’s the hottest woman ever, which might be where I (first) fail in the Boop demographic. There’s literally nothing else to Betty Boop. Is there nothing more to Betty Boop, the character? I haven’t seen any of the cartoons since childhood and the last Betty Boop appearance I would’ve seen was in a Roger Rabbit rewatch. A decade or so ago.

So not the target audience. If there is such a thing, because Robbins isn’t doing Boop for the classic Hollywood cartoon crowd. There’s an “18+” on the cover for a reason, as protagonist Alec gets over his performance anxiety and soon learns he and Betty are going to have to have a lot of threesomes if he’s going to want to stay alive. This volume—of fifty-two strips—has four major “plot gestures,” first involving protagonist Alec’s performance anxiety, then Bugs Bunny wanting to kill Alec and take his place in Betty Boop’s bed—Alec and Bugs work together at Subway but it’s unclear how Betty Boop knows Bugs—needless to say, the Boops come up with a solution to Bugs’s murderous machinations and it all works out.

At least until they don’t invite Sonic the Hedgehog—who bartends locally—to one of their soon infamous threesomes and it slowly drives him into a violent rage.

I mean… it’s all right. It probably shouldn’t open with a fake Jim Davis intro to the book because Mr. Boop then just reminds you of when Garfield isn’t quite funny enough either and it’s in a similar way to Boop. It probably reads better as a strip (Robbins published it daily). When part of the gag is there only being the one gag….

Well, it might just read better in single doses (or even limited ones) than a full dump. Though good cliffhanger.

And there are some funny strips in the backups from the guest cartoonists. Not the “Steven Universe” one, unless the point is never to want to watch “Steven Universe.”