Previously, my entire exposure to Betty Boop was her bit in Roger Rabbit, although, like Star Wars and pop music, Betty Boop as a cultural-concept has long buried its way into my subconscious. Plus, like me, she has a middle part (in her hair), so I feel we should stick together (although my middle-part is a lot more Joey on Dawson's Creek than Betty Boop). I'm also somewhat concerned, as I am with Wonder Woman, as to the state of Betty Boop's back due to her mammary endowments. That and she's apparently sixteen. I don't really know if this:



is a good look for a sixteen year old. I mean, the Jazz Inspector, who is clearly an adult (and who calls the Jazz Police!), is hitting on her in a way that a grown man should not be hitting on a sixteen year old. Thankfully for all her questionably appropriate attire, Langridge's Betty Boop never uses her sexuality as a performance: she's a waitress who wants to be a singer and she just so happens to look like Betty Boop.

How much boob tape (Boop tape?) do you think someone needs to keep that dress up? My enquiring mind wants to know.

So this book is a collection of four Betty Boop comics, in which the Devil sends a lizard to try and steal Gramps' house so that the Devil can claim Betty Boop's innocent soul for his own and ... well, it doesn't work obviously (I guess that's a spoiler, but this isn't some gritty reboot of Betty Boop where Gramps is a junkie and she's been sold into sex slavery or anything like that). It's seems rather convoluted a premise, but maybe the old Betty Boop cartoons (again -- all I know is this) are as wacky and convoluted. The whole thing read like watching a cartoon -- when I think back to last night (when I read it before going to bed), it isn't as if I read a book, but as if I watched cartoons. I like cartoons. And for all its silly twistiness, I liked this Betty Boop comic collection too.

Betty Boop by Robert Langridge went on sale May 16, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

Betty Boop from Roger Langridge and Gisele Lagace is a wonderful mix of nostalgia and superb contemporary comic art. The story is fun and meant to entertain rather than either scare or get too complicated. There is plenty of room in the realm of graphic novels for both the dark complex tales and the lighter more fun stories.

I found the story to be similar enough to some of the old Betty Boop stories to be nostalgic. The "bad guys" and monsters are not particularly scary or intimidating but neither were they meant to be. They have a role to play and they play it well. The drawings are wonderful, so reminiscent of the early days of both print and cinematic comics. Yet in neither case, the writing or the drawings, are Langridge and Lagace simply mimicking, they have indeed created a nostalgic look and feel while making Betty Boop new again.

I am glad this was not a modernization of Betty Boop, she absolutely belongs to her time period. I think any attempt to try to make her a 21st century woman would have been a mistake and, I think, not possible to do. Her brand of innocence does not play well in a contemporary setting.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

This probably isn't aimed at my target audience, but the nostalgia just didn't really do it for me. ( )