The Rugger Boys v1: “Why Are We Here Again?”

“The Rugger Boys” is filled with rugby players having hijinks, traveling to England, and kicking a ball in the mud. And it’s funny!

Let’s Talk About This Rugby Thing

I know nothing about Rugby.  Absolutely zero.  I don’t think I would like it very much, either.

I’m more of a no-contact sports fan myself.  Give me curling, bowling, Ultimate Frisbee, competitive darts, or something in those worlds.

But Rugby?  That’s a bunch of muddy men wrestling over a football in a field and occasionally kicking it and then climbing over each other to tackle each other or something.

For that reason, I can’t enthusiastically recommend “Rugby Men,” but I can say that it’s a solid comedic effort and I enjoyed it.

What “The Rugger Boys” Is

This book is a collection of single page gags first seen in the pages of Bamboo Magazine, which I’ve talked about here before.

The smart trick of the series is that very few gags rely on the subtleties of the game, itself. You could use most of this humor in an American football league or a soccer league, perhaps.

Ultimately, it’s about the characters and how they interact in various situations. Having an opponent’s fan in the stands shouting out plays like a coach is universal to any sports team, really.  “The Rugger Boys” just uses the tough nature of the sport to its favor for a gag at the end of the page.

It’s all about the characters, and this book clearly defines each at the very top. You have the playboy who gets all the girls and the battle-hardened coach.   You have the grumpy one and the violent one. They’re all trapped in their own adolescences.  They’re a rowdy group, but they each have moments where you can’t help but root for them or laugh with them.

The gags come from watching how they react to a given situation, or in how they interact with each other. That creates the humor.  It’s not the most revolutionary kind of humor. You’re not recreating the comedic comic book format with this one.  It’s just good, clean fun.

OK, Maybe Not So Clean

The book does have a few sophomoric bits of humor, but I tend to think that’s natural given the nature of the book.  The characters moon people out of a bus. They rely on the character with a gifted anatomy to frighten the other team away.  (I’m not so sure how that works, but it’s a good visual gag.  No, you don’t see anything past a bare butt.)

They’re a little crude at times, but they’re not offensive or mean.

My Kind of Art

Poupard is a great artist.  His cartoony style descends from Andre Franquin’s, but goes off in its own direction.  It’s very animated and cartoony, filled with wild gesticulations and a strong variety of body types and looks.  Most characters would be recognizable from their silhouettes in this book.  Their heads are different shapes.  The players even have different body types, from the lean running type to the no-neck bruiser kind.

He doesn’t skimp on the background, and has a great style to keep even the architecture believable without losing the cartooniness that attracts the reader to the overall style.  He uses an interesting trick where he silhouettes segments of the background that would be further in the distance and not as distinct, anyway.  You’ll see outlines of people on the sidelines of the field, or the shape of a building far away from the action.  It helps the characters in the foreground pop out on the page.  They’re not competing for your attention with lots of detailed line work.

The coloring work of Frecon and Rousseau helps here, too. They keep the background colors faded in a more neutral tone to set it apart from the brighter colored foreground character of interest.  Things look almost misty in the background.  To put it in photography terms, that silhouette acts as a cartoony kind of bokeh.

Best of all, it doesn’t compete with the art or try to complete it somehow.  It keeps everything crystal clear, and adds a little dash of shadow work to flesh things out.  It’s perfect.

The Small Annoyance

The coach’s accent is strange. Maybe this is a French cultural thing, but it still annoys me. It’s like anytime there’s a snake-themed character in a superhero comic, he or she has to talk with an emphasis on the “s” sound.  Any plural word will end with multiple “s”es to make the hissing sound complete.

The rugby coach does the same thing, but with the letter “R”.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it only happened when an “R” was at the end of a word or the end of a sentence. That would limit. Instead, it’s in every word balloon, often multiple times.  It grated on me quickly.

This isn’t, by the way, the translator’s fault.  This is an accent that comes straight from the original French dialogue.  (I looked it up.  You can find the French volumes available for sale digitally, too.)

Some characters in the book also approximate a British accent by adding a “W” in the middle of words.  It looks at first like they’re trying to go for a speech impediment where the characters never pronounce the “R”. That would make sense for a British character in comparison to an American accent.  Not so sure that works opposite a French accent, though. From an American point of view, they block don’t pronounce their “R”s a lot, either.

The English Language Barrier

Here’s the part of the book that threw me the most.  The book is set in France, which makes sense given the book’s publication history and creators.  The Rugger Boys are all French.  In the translation, they speak English with a British accent.  I spent a good chunk of the front half of the book thinking it was set in Great Britain.  Whoops.

The English translation and publication comes through Cinebook, which is a British company. That all makes sense.

About halfway through the book, the Rugger Boys travel to England for a match, and that’s when you should realize that they’re French and the British world is new and strange to them.  In fact, it turns into an Asterix volume, as Beka breaks out some British-isms to mine for humor. Everything from the food and drink to the local landmarks are set-up for gags.  They’re fairly simple, but there are some very funny ones in that sequence.  The book is not, however, “Asterix in Britain,” which we’ll be talking about next on The Asterix Agenda.

One Quick Fun Fact

The author of this series is Beka.  If that name sounds familiar, then you’ve been reading Pipeline for a long time. Beka is the pseudonym of the writing team of Bertrand Escaich and Caroline Roque.

They are also responsible for writing a book I’ve reviewed positively in the past (but not yet on this site), “Dance Class,” published in America by Papercutz.

Yes, the same writers handle both a series about brutish French rugby players and one about dancing teenage girls.

Now THAT’S some good variety right there.

Recommended?

Mildly so. I like the art. I love the format. This gag-a-page thing is right up my wheel house.  I think it’s also a great way for comics to find new markets.  Focus on different niches and let the people there buy their first comics, you know? If marketed properly, that’s always a possibility, at least.  I don’t know how well that works in practice, but I’ll keep hoping…

The book does provide some solid sit-com-level laughs, many of which are sold twice as hard as they might otherwise be without the great art to support them.

But, hey, if you don’t care about rugby at all, I understand this will be a hard sell.  Some of the humor is a little sophomoric.

I enjoyed it and will definitely be reading the second volume, which is already available.

— 2018.024 —

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