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The Doofus Omnibus

Rick Altergott is a maverick in the world of alternative comics, one of those rare major talents able to subsist solely on humor---a cartoonist's cartoonist. You are not likely to find much in the way of great meaning in the pages of Doofus. You are not likely to find much in the way of soul-searching autobiography or multi-contextual medium-stretching postmodernism. What you will find is a cartoonist so keenly aware of his talents that he achieves a perfect harmony with his pages---that rare artist of small pretense, whose wit and craft quietly place him in a class by himself. That the bulk of his cartoons feature the adventures of a socially retarded sexual predator in a pageboy haircut only adds to the fun.

It could be said with some fairness that Doofus is essentially a one-joke strip, relying on a type of humor that is puerile or juvenile, with emphasis on the scatological as well as sexual innuendo. On the face of it, that hardly seems promising.

But Altergott is gifted with an intimate understanding of his medium that allows the humor to interact with its presentation, thereby achieving a new meaning through the synthesis of medium and message. The deliberate care and craft he applies to his stories adds a sheen of convincing reality to the proceedings that successfully immerses the reader into the world of Doofus. This combined effect is quite humorous.

At least to me. A caveat emptor---if you cannot see yourself laughing, under any circumstances, at half-naked idiot manchildren running around with stolen and soiled women?s undergarments on their heads, then The Doofus Omnibus is not for you.

There?s a long and proud history of subversive humor in American comics, dating back to the original run of Mad magazine. Altergott is very firmly entrenched in this tradition---his work is extremely redolent of EC-era Wally Wood---almost to the point of absurdity.

Mad inspired generations of humorists to choose the comics page as their medium. Perhaps as a function of the underground nature of most satirical comics, the humor has always been edgier, franker, more insidious than similar venues; compared to the contents of Zap or Arcade, ?Laugh In? or ?Saturday Night Live? is tame. The comics medium attracts outlaws and deviants, the kind of comedians who simply would not play in Peoria.

Doofus lives in Flowertown, USA, a recreation of vintage Americana, circa 1955. But this is only the surface---underneath, strange and unusual things bubble about in an ocean of depravity. The half-witted Henry Hotchkiss accompanies Doofus on his adventures.

The conflict (and thus the humor) arises in these tales through Doofus?s ignorance of the pitiful nature of his activities. Most of his longer adventures involve some degree of sexual misadventure---whether it involves stealing Miss Juniper?s stinky underwear or expounding upon the virtues of chronic masturbation. Despite the creepy nature of his activities, Doofus simply has no concept that this is in any way untoward. He bounces through life with the same na?ve smile on his face as a five-year-old would possess---albeit a five-year-old chronic masturbator with a bottomless trust fund of beer and porn money. Doofus is pure idl; and the irony springs from the fact that he unable to gratify any but the most limited of his desires. But he is happy and fulfilled regardless.

Altergott gets most of his mileage out of simultaneously stymieing Doofus and highlighting the comical nature of his lowered expectations. Example: Doofus wants cold beer but he accidentally buys beer piss. Just the fact that they make canned beer piss is odd enough, but his earnest disappointment at having purchased beer piss is what clinches the deal.

It's not enough that Altergott makes it funny once, he makes it funny repeatedly---funny enough to support a 112-page compilation. It takes a special type of talent to mine a single vein so successfully that it continues to yield high-grade ore for many, many years.

Regardless of how successful alt-comics field may or may not see in the ensuing years, it?s probably a safe bet that Rick Altergott will remain criminally underrated.

The reason why is simple. In order to "get" Doofus, the reader has to have a high degree of familiarity with the medium---enough so the many layers of irony inherent in Doofus's adventures become clear. You need to know how to read the page, have a fairly deep knowledge of comics history, and know how to interpolate that against your knowledge of American history, art, and literature as a whole. Comics, perhaps more than any other medium, depends on the audience?s ability to cross-reference past comics and cultural artifacts from other mediums in order to achieve a broader understanding. The experienced comics reader can understand extremely complicated applications of irony and metaphor almost instantaneously.

An example of this irony is Doofus? appearance. Doofus is dressed, as I said, in too-tight children?s clothing, with a lacy girls blouse and tiny boy?s breeches. He looks absurd. Yet when Doofus interacts with his world the world accepts him as ?normal?, laughing with him instead of at him. It?s an interesting reversal - in movies like American Pie, the loutish and puerile behavior of the characters is generally lampooned and contextually reviled. We?re supposed to laugh at them because the story?s moral context holds the same ostensible values as the world the audience inhabits; the action constantly seeks to undermine each characters earnest subversity. In Doofus, the behavior is far worse and far more explicit than anything in American Pie, but Altergott doesn?t play down to his audience by framing Doofus in terms of modern screwball comedy. The irony---right down to Doofus? idiotic clothing---stems from the audience?s awareness outer morality and the fact that everything in Altergott?s divinely twisted universe seems pathologically screwed-up. Doofus thinks we?re laughing with him, and that?s the best possible punch line.

Comics are an extremely accessible medium at their core---storytelling boiled down to the basic components of words and pictures in interplay. But once you start adding layers of history and meaning, they can become as complicated to the layman as Ulysses would be to a fifth-grader, or Persona to someone whose idea of art cinema is My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Rare are those comics that can be appreciated fully at face value---without the right background and education, Peanuts becomes just a funny cartoon about precocious kids.

I think its safe to say that if you aren?t familiar with Wally Wood, aren?t conscious of pop-culture ?kitsch? and don?t have at least a layman?s grasp of the history of satirical cartooning, you won?t get anything but the juvenilia, the ?pee jokes,? in Doofus. But if you do have such a background, then Doofus will hold a special pleasure for you.