Vaughn Bodé

I was truely awestruck, the fist time I read a Vaughn Bodé "Erotica" album. It was in the early 80'es and up till then all I knew about comics had basically included Spirou, Tintin, Asterix and the miscellaneous Marvel and DC comics that seemed to be everywhere.
The Bodé style was so extravagant and powerful! I'd never seen anything like it and after finishing it, I had to pick it up and reread it over and over again. The linework were so fat and juicy and the colours so bright it hurt your eyeballs, if you stared too hard at them, and I was thrilled. Some of the stories weren't really that good, but whatever the stories lacked, the artwork made up for it by far. Every picture in his comics seems to be an vignette by it self, composed to stand alone, but accidentally brought together to form these wierd stories.

And what characters they had! Most of them were sexually frustrated lizards and the few who weren't lizards, were mostly "broads" (labeling those as "characters" in this context is somewhat of a overstatement, sorry). They made a mockery of everything, and that without a trace of politically correctness, finger pointing or taboos in any of them. It was truly great and very tantalising for a young boy.

Some years after my first encounter with Bodé, I discovered his comic "Deadbone" which again was brilliant. As Comicrag.com describes it:

"The world of Deadbone is explored with a constantly shifting parade of weird lizards, sexy broads, soldiers, fascists and sages all in funny, strange, sexy or even enlightening situations."
Which In my humble opinion is quite precise.

But compared with the Erotica series, Deadbone contained a more structured, limited universe - the mountain "Deadbone" and the small town on it's peak (very phallic and very Bodé), and for a period of time I worked really hard on converting the Deadbone world into a RPG. I gave up though when I couldn't find the right angle on it, but I still think someone should give it a shot.

His biggest sucess was "Cheech Wizard," a wizard wearing a large yellow hat, covered with black and red stars that covers his entire body except his red legs. Bodé tried to adress a broader public with it in 1967. It obviously didn't go well with the times and it sank back into the underground from where it came, and got a huge following there. I still prefer the black and white 60'es version - the 70'es are just too dopey and repetitive for me.

Vaughn Bodé died in 1975, age 33, of autoerotic asphyxiation, or perhaps the use of asphyxia as a meditation aid. A terrible loss for the comic industry, and only very few comic artists has since made such an impact on pop culture as he did - Especially the graffiti movement owes him a lot, borrowing, copying and generally being inspired by his artwork and style. Graffiti pieces literally wouldn't be the same without him, even though he - to my knowledge - never made a single graffiti himself.


Just recently I found out that he in the 60'es illustrated a series of classics for "reading challenged" children and these are really quite nice. All very sharp and well composed, and in them you can see both his knack for vignettes as well as his big influences by Burne Hogarth and Milton Caniff. The one shown here is taken from Jules Verne's "20.000 Leagues Under the Sea".

Do check some of them out here: They are very nice.

A sample of a typical "Erotica" comic can be seen here.