The Bojeffries: A family to love

The Bojeffries. French edition by Komics Initiative

Some months ago I wrote a little piece for the French edition of The Bojeffries. 

You can read the English version here. Special thanks to my friends Omar Martini and Gary Spencer Millidge for their editing and proofreading. Grazie amici!

 

The French ed is a gorgeous production: large format, hardcover with also a limited variant cover & print both by Laurent Lefeuvre.

The book is published by Komics Initiative and it has been crowdfunded via Ulule.

A FAMILY TO LOVE
by smoky man

I have to admit it: I discovered The Bojeffries pretty late.

Partly because of a mere question of age: around the second half of the ‘90s I became aware of The Bojeffries stories published in “Warrior” magazine and other publications, but they remained Moore’s obscure British gem to be tracked down and read… sooner or later.
You have to realize that Watchmen’s first complete, Italian edition – the now-classic trade paperback with the bloodstained broken window and the falling smiley-face button over a weird New York skyline background – was dated 1993 and that British comics were hard to find… harder than the American floppies.
At that time in Italy, all the attention was on Moore's main American works: Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta and, as just mentioned, Watchmen. The latter was initially serialised – without the original covers and the text parts – as a supplement in a glorious comic magazine named after the glorious comics character Corto Maltese… but that’s another story.
Furthermore, we were at the very beginning of the Internet era, and information was far more distant than an easy click as it is now.

If my memory serves me well, in the late ‘90s - early 2000s I finally got my hands on – let's describe them in this way – some “adventurous” black and white photocopies from “Warrior” no. 12 and no. 13, where the very first Bojeffries story was published.
The cover of issue no. 12 featured the Bojeffries: five strange-looking characters, an out-of-the-ordinary family in the same vein as The Addams Family or The Munsters, with the captivating tag line “Makes Monty Python look like a comedy” and, at the bottom of the page, “... a soap opera of the paranormal”. I loved Monty Python! And the story, well... it was odd. A strange reading experience with gorgeously perfect art by Steve Parkhouse: you could feel an unreachable Britishness (the town where the Bojeffries live is Northampton, isn't it?) and, at the same time, some deep empathy for that monstrous, but ordinary, working-class family. Well, poor Trevor Inchmale, rest in peace!
I realized there were other Bojeffries stories, but it was not the time yet for me to read them. I had those photocopies, and that was all. I confess that now they are lost, only a thing in my memory. But that’s another story, too.

In 2002 I started working on the Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman book.
The Internet had become an established resource, an infinite web full of, well, everything. If you had the patience to wait during navigation and downloading, of course.
Therefore, while researching for the book, I read tons of material, including dozens of interviews with Moore. In one of them, dated 1984 and published in “Comics Interview” no. 12, Moore was talking with Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker and discussing his “Warrior” series:

«Guy Lawley: The Bojeffries Saga is your most English strip of all.

Alan Moore: That's my other favorite. It's as experimental in its way as V for Vendetta. Humor in comics, since Harvey Kurtzman's brilliant MADs, has become formularized - fast humor, lots of sight gags in every panel. I wanted to get the character stuff back into humour, and the England of the '50s that I can remember - the quirkiness of it all. Steve Parkhouse is the main vision behind the strip.

Steve Whitaker: It's an opportunity for you to use all that colloquial, idiomatic language.

AM: I love language: slang, jargon, poetry. How silly it can be - and how powerful and evocative.»

Again, in 1985, in an interview taken from “Arken Sword” no. 13/14 (it was a double issue), Moore said:

«In terms of the series I've created myself, V and The Bojeffries are still my firm favourites, and both for surprisingly similar reasons considering that they're such different strips. The thing is, they're both personal strips. V is a strip that recreates the world I see around me in very harsh and dramatic political terms, and by which I've tried to examine a lot of the more abstract concepts that I have floating around my head. The Bojeffries recreates the world I see around me in very affectionate and surreal terminology, enabling me to examine my background from a certain quirky perspective. Raoul's Night Out remains my favourite of The Bojeffries stuff because I think it captured almost exactly what I feel about British working-class life without getting sloppy or maudlin about it.»

In the same period, still putting together Portrait, I came into possession of some bootleg, digital copies of the whole “Warrior” run, and I could finally read Raoul's adventure. He is the funniest werewolf you ever knew of, isn't he? (And he's a bit Moore himself, isn't he?) And what a story and a powerful, satirical piece, too. Are we sure that times have changed?

In 2002 Steve Parkhouse – involved by my friend and co-editor Gary Spencer Millidge – contributed a great text piece and a fantastic Bojeffries illustration to my Portrait book published in 2003 by Gary's Abiogenesis Press. I felt like everything came full circle, sort of, because I knew there were other Bojeffries stories, from “A1 Magazine” and some others published by Fantagraphics, that I needed to read.
Again in 2003, from The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore edited by my friend George Khoury (a sort of companion piece to my Portrait book), Moore declared:

«Alan Moore: […] Bojeffries was important in that it was one of the most personal things that I’ve done. Among other things, I know that Bojeffries seems weird…

George Khoury: Especially to Americans. I still don’t get it! [laughs]

AM: Well, it looks very surrealistic to Americans, whereas, to me, it’s a thing that I’ve done that I’ve come closest to actually describing the flavor of an ordinary working-class childhood in Northampton. And the inherent surrealism in British life. Yeah, that’s a very important strip to me.

GK: Why weren’t there more Bojeffries strips, or is it a difficult strip for you to write?

AM: It was very difficult. In some ways, the nearest equivalent to Bojeffries that I’m doing today is something like Jack B. Quick, where you can’t do that many because the humor is so peculiar. But you can’t just turn it out on a formula. The humor is strange little bits of observation, or odd little ideas, and you’ll know them when they’re right. Humor is a delicate thing, especially with strips like Jack B. Quick and the Bojeffries, which have such quirky humor. That’s why there are so few of them. I still entertain the idea that I should at some point in the future... me and Steve Parkhouse have talked about doing another Bojeffries strip, after the Blair government has worked its magic upon British society. The family’s probably completely broken up and Ginda Bojeffries is probably one of the Blair babes, Labour new women M.P.s. The son of the family is probably a Booker Prize-winning author who spends most of his time at the Groucho Club, having reached fame by writing what people take to be witty, magic realist stories about his working-class upbringing. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that we could do. That we still might do. But we have to wait until we’ve got something that’s good enough.»

There was even more Bojeffries than expected. Maybe…

Fast forward. In 2008 I exchanged some emails with Steve Parkhouse who confessed this to me (I think it's fair to share it now):

«I'm working on a new Bojeffries story right now. It's a very big story and updates all the characters to our present time in 2008-09. We're hoping it will be part of a collected work published next year. [...] Alan has written the script.
I would suggest you keep it confidential for the time being in case it doesn't appear, and people will be disappointed. [...] The artwork is just at layout stage [...]»

WOW! It would be worth the wait.
Meanwhile, I found and read some of the stories published in the “A1” anthology. It was like looking into a parallel reality, a strange British alternate universe that you couldn't fully understand. Fascinating!

Fast forward no. 2. 2013: time has passed and no news regarding The Bojeffries.
In August, in a rare trip outside the island where I live, I flew to Edinburgh and attended Stripped, the comics and graphic novels event, part of The Edinburgh International Book Festival. Going around the city, I discovered by chance a comic shop. Needless to say, I entered and started rummaging through the boxes for something worth buying. Wow, they had a lot of “Warrior” issues! It was a tough choice but... I picked “Warrior” no.12, the one with the Bojeffries first appearance! Maybe it was a good omen, I said to myself. I have to add that the comic shop owners and their friends looked like close cousins of the Bojeffries. But that’s another story, too. Maybe...

At the end of 2013, Top Shelf and Knockabout finally announced The Bojeffries complete edition with a brand-new story set a couple of decades after the original run, to be released in 2014. Hallelujah! It was a good omen, wasn't it?
The new story was pure fun, reuniting the family in a very odd and thunderous way, Big Brother included. And Parkhouse’s art was perfect, as usual.

And now… it’s French time! Ça l'est vraiment!
I am sure you will love the company of The Bojeffries. We all love them.

Final confession. Sure… nowadays Moore is focused on his prose novels, but let me dream a bit... what about a new Bojeffries story set in our current times? Well, maybe in a brighter post-pandemic era would be better.
Time will tell.

smoky man
Sardinia,
May 2021