"Where do we go when we die?" "Vhe Gho to Blutty Hyingland!!"
- Uncle Festus Zlutodny
After months of seeing this on the shelves at the local library and not knowing much about the title, I finally borrowed it- this beauty born from two trusted creators. So glad I did.
The Bojeffries Saga, a stuttering but undefeated epic spanning the pages of Warrior, Dalgoda, A1 and eventually its own full collection by Top Shelf Productions. Jobremus Bojeffries lives in Northampton with his children Reth and Ginda (a man-frightening giantess with subatomic powers), brothers/uncles Fester (vampire) and Raoul (werewolf with the smell of and taste for dog), grandfather (on the brink of onmipotent protoplasm) and the baby - which is nuclear. Their terrace home is dimensionally precocious and equipped with a curiosity dampener to keep mere earthlings out (but, alas, not rent collectors.) And with all of this awesome potential, what do the Bojeffries family intend with the world of man? Well, simply to live in it. And be left well alone.
His monsters aspiring to living small, circular daily lives. Moore specialises in pulling the spandex pants of goshcrikey comicking down to reveal the everyday absurdity. He doesn't necessarily mock the format; it's too useful, and he clearly loves it and speaks its language. His co-conspirator in this endeavour is similarly fluent. Parkhouse is a comics powerhouse, a writer, script editor and formidable artist in a caricature style. We have Parkhouse to thank for the early Stockbridge and Voyager cycles in Doctor Who Weekly, as well as the later Luke Kirby stories in 2000AD, not to mention the comic's early Nineties bete noir Big Dave, which may well share some of its DNA with Bojeffries.
There’s hay to be made in the satirical approach to comics; take a successful formula from other media, skew it with a local variant or a ‘what if?’ Question in the time-honoured style of Alan Moore adherents like Mark Millar and Grant Morrison, remove the adolescent power fantasy nonsense, and with luck you get what Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse do so well. The truly bizarre - skewed so much further it’s hilariously familiar. And so Bojeffries is as much a salute to England's working class, Moore and Parkhouse's "Jerusalem", though the title may well be ironic, ostensibly set in the Eighties, and then the Nineties and beyond. It is more or less timeless; weirdness locked in its own suburban eddy.
Each member of the family gets their own story - some more than one if you include the 24-page epilogue which brings the family up to date (as of 2014) and includes a good number of pop culture cameos and a torturous phonetic narration (with occasional insight by a similarly phonetic Gok Wan) Each story is a cracker, helped immensely by the characterisations of the family - near-ultimate power combined with ineptitude and bathos. Parkhouse renders them with an expert hand, and is unafraid to use a lighter pen for thinner strokes - just a hint of holding line around the edges of characters, but otherwise as true and ephemeral as Lowry's matchstick men.
And ephemeral is what Bokeffries may well be described as, too. Bits and pieces pulled together by the universe into an improbable creation, shuffling through "Hyingland"'s pot-holed streets on the way to the bingo. I love it, and will probably buy it. And I haven't even mentioned the musical episode yet.
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