7/9/07
The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius
I don't know about you guys, but I was annoyed when I heard about the Disney movie "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius". When I heard about the Disney cartoon series it spawned, "The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius", I was downright appalled. It's not because of anything to do with the cartoon itself, however. It is because Disney likely got the concept for their series (I would go so far as to say they stole the concept outright) from an independent comic book series called The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius.
Created by Judd Winick (Green Arrow) and published by Oni Press, Barry Ween predates Jimmy Neutron by a couple of years and is immensely more entertaining. Originally released in single issues, they are now collected in the following trade paperbacks:
- The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius
- The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius 2.0
- The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius: Monkey Tales
- The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius: Gorilla Warfare
Barry Ween is a 10 year old with an unparalleled genius intellect. In his own words, he was born smart, exhibiting self-awareness while in his mother's womb. Imagine a kid from South Park with the unlimited knowledge & technological resources of Reed Richards, the acerbic, paranoid wit of Bill Hicks & the mouth of a sailor and you begin to grasp just what Barry as a character is capable of.
Barry is a bit of a paradox, a genius that recognizes that most geniuses before him have taken themselves way too seriously. His evaluations of what he considers to be historical intellectual peers are hilarious. For example, he sums up Thomas Edison thusly: "What an asshole. Smart guy, but also a patent thief that had an ego to almost eclipse the mountain of self-importance I possess." But for all his successes, he has made his fair share of blunders in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, like giving Hippos the reproductive capabilities of rats ("STOP HUMPING, YOU FAT FUCKS!!"). Indeed, it is the side-effects of these experiments that offer the best comedic material to work with.
But by far the most entertaining (and sometimes touching) parts of this series come from Barry's interactions with his friends and family. The afore-mentioned experimental snafus tend to affect his friends Jeremy & Sara and his parents. In the span of these books his parents get kidnapped by a drunken sasquatch, his father's body regresses to that of a neanderthal, Sara gets sucked into an alternate dimension & becomes a warrior princess, and Jeremy accidentally drinks a formula that turns him into a dinosaur. Most of these scenarios lead to a plethora of well-crafted dick-and-fart jokes that would make Matt Stone & Trey Parker green with envy.
But the real surprise comes from how well those jokes go hand-in-hand with how successfully Judd Winick makes the emotions of Barry and his friends as real as possible. Barry would likely be as boring as a pre-An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore if it weren't for the rapport between him, Jeremy, Sara & Bigfoot-turned-student Roxie. It is his interaction with them that makes the stories so rewarding and, in the case of the story "The Tale of the Great Ape", emotionally stirring.The Bottom Line
The only flaw that I can find with this series at this point is the fact that there haven't been any new issues out in a few years. This is because Judd Winick is currently focusing his creative efforts on mainstream superhero books like Green Arrow. As a fanboy I can say that he is writing some of the best Green Arrow stories in years, but I would much rather have some new Barry Ween at my fingertips. If you guys read the series and love it as much as I do, let's blow up his MySpace page and see if we can motivate him to get back to work on it.
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