Oboy Comics no. 8 is the latest installment in Shaheen Beardsley’s series about a narcissistic idiot in a superhero’s get-up. Oboy, the starring idiot, possesses powers akin to Superman’s, but he’s drawn as a paunchy schlub, his spandex revealing a prominent gut instead of muscles. Coming to his senses after a drug-fueled bender, Oboy discovers that while he was incapacitated, he saved a journalist who’d been captured by terrorists. He has no memory of this, but his apparent heroism wins him an invitation to the “League of Justice,” an inversion of DC Comics’ “Justice League.” The plot gets its momentum from Oboy’s attempts to solve the mystery of how he managed to save the journalist, but the story reads as a sitcom à la Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Trailer Park Boys, to name two series that Beardsley cites as influences. Oboy joins the League to “steal from work” like a “real anti-capitalist hero,” but he no more takes a principled stance against the League than he devotes himself to their cause. Oboy gets drunk at the League’s headquarters, he foils their efforts to defeat Dragon Lord, the issue’s antagonist, and he drags the League’s other members down to his level. The jokes are, to be fair, quite stupid – I say that as a fan of stupid jokes – but Beardsley’s craftsmanship is undeniable. On a visit to his studio, he let me leaf through the stack of original pages. It’s common in cartoonists’ studios to handle originals this informally, but they deserve to be hanging in frames. The drawing has an admirable precision, a crispness that gestures at once to the French ligne claire tradition and to silver-age superhero artists like John Romita Sr. With the exception of a brief action sequence at the issue’s center, the panels tend to depict the characters in conversation. Despite this, the poses are varied, the facial expressions elastic, and the compositions dynamic. In addition to these original pages, Beardsley also exhibits his adaptation of the Oboy character as an actual filmed sitcom – Oboy’s truest form, perhaps, but I can’t help but miss the drawings.
— Peter Smyth, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student