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| Review by Lily Fierro |
Written and Illustrated by Max Fleischer
Publisher: Titan Comics
ISBN: 9781848567078
Price: $34.99
Release Date: August 19, 2015
One of the greatest challenges of the comic form arises when a comic strip must attempt to capture a well known persona from film and animation into a separate series.
For some characters, this can work.
However, for ones whose humor and personality stem from movement, stature, and voice, the transition of those characters and their worlds from a time-based medium to a print based medium can lead to an underwhelming product, for in a comic strip, the characters must have their eccentricities and scenarios represented in a static form, and this just cannot occur for characters whose fundamental allure comes from motion and/or sound, and sadly, such is the case with Betty Boop.
The Definitive Betty Boop collects the multiple comic strip forms of Betty Boop including Helen Kane’s short-lived series, The Original Boop-Boop-A-Doop Girl, and Max Fleischer’s Sunday strips and dailies of the Betty Boop series.
While the introduction by Brian Walker gives informative insight into the creation of Betty Boop and her multiple formations as a leading animation lady, a comic strip lead, and eventually a popular icon, it also implicitly prepares us to understand that by the time the comic strip began running, the animation series that brought Betty Boop to fame as a character (and the reason why I personally love her myself) had begun to wane because of the increased enforcement of the Hays Code in film by 1934, forcing Betty Boop’s antics to stray away from her more extraordinary scenarios such as lion taming in the circus and cave dwelling to find walrus-like ghosts singing Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” and toward less salacious and suggestive situations overall.
Consequently, you enter The Definitive Betty Boop with an expectation that the comics will be far tamer than the animations of the early 1930s, and they most certainly are.
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