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Comic Book / The Bojeffries Saga

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The Bojeffries Saga is a humour comic strip created by Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse. Early installments were published along with V for Vendetta and Marvelman in the Anthology Comic Warrior. After Warrior ended subsequent installments were published in various comics titles around the turn of the 1990s, and a new Distant Finale strip was created for the complete collection published in 2014.

The basic concept of the series, similarly to The Munsters and The Addams Family, involves a family of weird horror entities trying to live a normal life in an ordinary world. Except in this case, the "ordinary world" is a council house in Northampton.


This comic provides examples of:

  • Alien Geometries: A trapdoor that should lead up to the house's loft opens in the back garden.
  • Black Comedy Rape: Barely averted when Ginda tries to have a one-night-stand. It's averted because she thinks "safe sex" means masturbating in different rooms, and the man she forces to come home with her takes advantage of this by leaving when he has the chance.
  • Cloud Cuckoolander: Raoul is... somewhat strange. (For example, innocently giving white supremacist propaganda to a black workmate because he finds it too stupid to take seriously, and not noticing that all his relatives have moved out and the house is derelict.)
  • Creepy Family: the comics has been described as a homage to The Addams Family and The Munsters in England.
  • Decoy Protagonist: The first arc introduces us to the family through the eyes of a rent collector trying to get a century's rent arrears out of them. It ends with Grandpa turning him into a geranium plant.
  • Dirty Cop: After a fight breaks out at Raoul's works party (due to Raoul giving a black workmate white supremacist propaganda), the cops turn up, violently beat up and arrest the black guy, and promise to meet the white supremacist guy at "the meeting next Wednesday".
  • Distant Finale: The final installment created for the 2014 collection, which happens twenty years after the last strip.
  • Do You Want to Copulate?: Ginda's attempt to pick up a guy is this.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Grandpa Podlasp is some kind of muck-monster who has reality-warping powers and speaks in a mixture of garbled malapropisms and Lovecraft-speak.
  • Fast-Forward to Reunion: The Distant Finale works on this.
  • Genius Bruiser: Ginda has super-strength and also super-intelligence.
  • Holy Burns Evil: Festus can't even see a hot-cross bun or hear the Bible quoted without crumbling to dust.
  • I Have No Son!: In the Distant Finale, Reth has been disowned by the rest for becoming famous by writing a memoir in which he expressed his loathing for them all. And when they're reunited, instead of being reconciled, they kill him.
  • Intelligible Unintelligible: Festus mostly speaks in cod-Cyrillic gibberish, which all his relatives can understand.
  • Madwoman in the Attic: Grandpa in the greenhouse, and "baby" in the cellar.
  • Malaproper: Ginda shows signs of this in the story Sex with Ginda Bojeffries, in particular using the phrase "premature evacuation"
  • Misery Lit: Reth gets disowned by the rest for writing one of these about his upbringing.
  • Mr. Muffykins: A negative attitude to little dogs is probably implied in Raoul's self-defence at the beginning when accused of dog-eating:
    Raoul: Was not dog anyway. Was poodle.
  • Monster Mash: The basic concept of the comic.
  • Musical Episode: The "Song of the Terraces" story.
  • Neck Snap: Ginda does this on a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of David Cameron during Prime Minister's Question Time.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: Raoul sometimes becomes a pure wolf and sometimes a Wolf Man, based on Rule of Funny.
  • Perception Filter: The rent collector's intrusion on the house is blamed on the "curiosity damper" breaking down.
  • Present Absence: The mother of the family, (who presumably is Raoul's and Festus's sister, given their different surname) is noticeably never seen or mentioned.
  • Reality Show: The Distant Finale ends with the family being reunited on Celebrity Big Brother.
  • Running Gag: Raoul eating dogs, and Festus constantly dying.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Straw Feminist: This is pretty much the only joke where Ginda is concerned.
  • Symbol Swearing: Parodied with Colin's girlfriend Sheena, who has "*** OFF" tattooed on her forehead. As in, she literally has "*** OFF" tattooed on her forehead, with the asterisks. Lampshaded in the Distant Finale when she remarks how glad she is that her tattoo doesn't read "FUCK OFF".
  • Take That!: Several in the Distant Finale:
    • Festus is lead singer of a ridiculous Black Metal band called Pram Of Shit.
    • The art presenter "Mark Glasses" is a caricature of BBC presenter Mark Lawson.
    • Reth's memoir was adapted into a dreadful film called Meet the MacJeffries, which is a parody of the various poor-quality film adaptations of Alan Moore's comics, especially their dubious grasp of British culture and language.
  • They Killed Kenny Again: Festus keeps horribly dying after falling foul of various vampire weaknesses, and having to be resurrected.
  • Vegetarian Vampire: Festus only drinks "Soy Blood" and will get into arguments with Raoul when he hears that he's eaten another dog.
  • Überwald: Both Raoul and Festus are Eastern European in accent, and their surname is "Zlüdøtny". (Actually no language uses both ü and ø.)
  • The Unseen: Baby Bojeffries, who is some kind of unknowable nuclear entity who lives in the basement and speaks in complex mathematical formulae.
  • You No Take Candle: Raoul's dialogue has weird grammar and is sprinkled with Scandinavian "ø"'s.

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