Once, long long ago, Judd Winick was viewed as one of the up-and-coming young talents in the independent comics field. His first major success, the autobiographical comic ‘Pedro and Me’, was seen as touching and funny and heartwarming all at the same time, and the art was charmingly cartoonish. He followed it up with an excellent syndicated strip, ‘Frumpy the Clown’, which he thankfully wound up before it became lazy. And then, before being hired to an exclusive deal with DC that eventually left him consigned to the hell of writing the event comics that Dan DiDio needed written to move his grand vision of the DC universe forward and to hell with character and plot log (a period of his career we won’t dwell on for the purposes of being relentlessly positive in these columns)…he wrote ‘Barry Ween, Boy Genius’.
The premise is not, on the face it it, particularly original; it’s about a pre-teen boy (the titular Barry) who actually is super-intelligent and has a secret laboratory in his room, where he invents super-science stuff and hangs with his best friend Jeremy (who is not a genius, but is in on his secret.) ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’, to pick a predecessor at random, has essentially the same premise. But where ‘Ween’ differs is in its treatment of the idea. Winick said that one of the reasons he quit doing ‘Frumpy’ was that he felt that he had to tone down his ideas to the mainstream sensibility of the funny pages, and he definitely shows that in ‘Barry Ween’. This is really a series that could only be done in the medium of independent comics, because it’s the product of a single artistic voice with no intention of pulling punches to get onto Cartoon Network.
‘Barry Ween’ takes as central to its premise the idea that geniuses in real life are rarely what you’d call well-balanced, sociable individuals. They are all too frequently prone to problems fitting in with the rest of society, and that’s before you factor in the fact that as a ten-year old, Barry is even more out of step with his peers intellectually than even an adult John Nash. Barry is a cranky, irritable, impatient misanthrope, trying to force himself to fit into the world not to preserve his secret (it’s suggested at one point that he could easily invent a robot to attend school for him) but to keep himself from sliding off the deep end into madness. His friends and family are there to ground him and humanize him, something he knows he badly needs.
And yet, that never gets in the way of utter hilarity. A cranky, irritable misanthrope with awesome technology that makes him a modern-day wizard, hanging out with a normal ten-year old who’s kind of clumsy and doesn’t understand a thing his friend is doing or saying, is a recipe for comedy gold. Winick has a gift for using profanity as a sort of perverse, mellifluous poetry, giving his characters lines like, “Color me nine different shades of not giving a fuck!” and “Now you, my friend, will see how we kick ass in the suburbs.” The scenarios he depict unfold with the slow, gathering momentum of a freight train on a steep slope with bad brakes; what starts with Jeremy fiddling with some purple goop winds up with Barry having to erase someone’s memory because he’s collecting hair samples from the swimming pool to clone a new body for someone rapidly turning into a dinosaur. Time travel, dimensional portals, centaurs, super-intelligent gorillas from another universe, ebola-infected monkeys…pretty much every plotline sounds like it could be serious, and the series flirts with it at times, but all of them will leave you laughing. (Um, unless you’re easily offended by profanity. In that case, this is not the book for you.)
And all of this is illustrated by Winick as well. He’s not a realist; he’s never going to be confused with Frank Miller or John Byrne. But as a cartoonist, Winick is gold. His faces are hilariously impressive, and his art has a sort of claymation quality to it that suggests a world just slightly off-kilter from reality. It’s the perfect art for this story…or, perhaps, Winick came up with a story idea that perfectly suits his artistic sensibilities. Either way, it looks great.
A lot of people are frustrated by the substandard work Winick has turned out in his time at DC; for myself, I think his only real crime is being the hired gun who’s been asked to execute a lot of bad ideas. But I’ll admit, I’d still like him to leave DC. Not so much to see him avoid another ‘Titans East Special’, although that’d be a plus…I want to see him do some more ‘Barry Ween’ comics.
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Ah, the good old days when Judd Winick was a writer and not a punch line.
Barry Ween was one of those weird books that shouldn’t have worked but it did. This was a series that managed to do a poop joke that was actually funny; “Barry says it will be my major in college”. The main character is unlikable but still sympathetic; Barry is completely aware that he’ll be insane by the time he’s a teenager.
His willingness to characterize a 10 year like you say he does might have something to do with his willingness to mess with DC comics characters
As true now as it was then.
I agree 100% P&M, Frumpy & Ween are all gold.
Some of judd’s Dc work is IMO underrated.
His Green Lantern run was very good. A great and consistent evolution for Kyle Rayner after Ron Marz left the title. As MGK noted in a prior post, Under The Hood is a very enjoyable story arc. And Judd’s Outsiders run was pretty good as well.
Early on I think that Winick suffered from trying to make boys talk like teenagers, but as “Ween” went on he got better at giving them their own voices.
I’d like to see more of “Ween”. In fact, I’ve often thought you could make a great TV show out of it, some kind of weird mix of “Buffy”, “Dexter” and some modern sci-fi setting.
I may be misremembering “Frumpy,” but in the time I got to read it, it always seemed like Winick struggled with pacing and tried to cram too much into the fourth panel. My stereotypical, exaggerated “Frumpy” would be:
Panel 1, kid: “You feeling OK?”
Panel 2, Frumpy: “Yes…”
Panel 3, Frumpy: “Why do you ask?”
Panel 4, kid: “Because your sleeve’s on fire.” Frumpy: “Why didn’t you SAY something?” Kid: “Because I thought it was a joke!” Frumpy: “My SLEEVE is on FIRE!”
That having been said, I do like the guy, and I can still picture his “Frumpy” style. I’d agree that his run on Green Lantern was very good; the give-and-take in his Green Lantern “Circle of Fire” issue was golden.
More Barry, please.
Barry Ween was indeed better than much of Winick’s later work. And I’ve read more of him than I care to admit, and his superhero work is often just kind of there even when it’s not bad. What really seems to get a lot of superhero goats is that he’s always adding gay people to comics where no gay people were before and that is just making more work for Johns to kill them off later.
I once described Barry Ween as “a blend of Dexter’s Laboratory with Men in Black and written by Quentin Tarantino for kids.”
It’s a great series (track down the uncollected single issues that aren’t in the Oni omnibus edition). The black & white series ended with one of the most poignant scenes EVER in a comic, where Barry realizes how close he came to losing his friends and for the first time ever breaks down in tears.
Powerful, poignant stuff…
…and as funny as shit.
I want new Barry Ween soooo bad. The last story especially was not only funny, but was poignant in a way that felt like a two by four between the eyes.
By the way, any love for Juniper Lee? He was the showrunner on it, and I really liked it.
@KD: I agree. It’s not that he’s never done any good superhero comics, it’s that his brand has been diluted by being DC’s go-to guy for “this story idea sucks, so we have to sell it hard. Who has a great ear for dialogue? Oh, hey! Judd!” It’s resulted in some rough work with his name on it.
@Murc: Can’t lie, I was thinking of that strip the whole time. 🙂
His Green Lantern run is one of my favorites. I think Its much better than anything since Rebirth.
Exiles was a really underrated book too.
Outsiders is where he lost me. It wasn’t a bad book but somewhere along the line I just stopped picking it up.
I read his Batman run (well, the Scarecrow story and Under the Hood anyway) and thought it was mediocre at best.
@JP Cardier: Yeah, Juniper Lee was quite good.
Last I heard, Winick was off Batwing and Catwoman, and working on an all-ages project. Really, is “Winick” still a four-letter word? I see a guy who can look like a yutz on cable television, and come away making his own mark, as well as getting the girl of his dreams. Now . . . basing at least four characters on his wife Pam? Different issue.
I liked me some Juniper Lee. Yes, some of it was recycled Barry Ween stories (e.g., the Bigfoot girl), but it had enough originality on it own. Also: Pug with a Scottish accent. Awesome.
@JP Cardier: As much as I loved Barry Ween, I don’t want new stuff because Winick took the premise, rode it as far as he needed to–into some truly grim territory–and then got off it, walked away and never looked back. Imagine how much better Twin Peaks would be remembered if David Lynch had done the same.