Review by Frank Plowright

For all the magnificent Judge Dredd stories they wrote together, there’s a strong case to be made that John Wagner and Alan Grant’s finest collaboration is their first look at Francis Clunie, a deluded psychiatric patient. He believes he’s Humphrey Bogart’s on-screen tough guy detective persona, which is beautifully captured in the Chandleresque dialogue. He escapes to torment Glasgow, painstakingly recreated as it was in 1990 by Robin Smith who also captures the lunacy of The Bogie Man blundering into the activities of real criminals as he runs down the Fat Man and searches for the Big Bird.

Read a more detailed review of Clunie’s magnificent first outing here, and it opens the Incomplete Case Files, so named for missing out ‘The Manhattan Project’ a slightly too fanciful sequel set in New York and involving the abduction of then Vice-President Dan Quayle. It may also apply to some panels from the first story being redrawn to avoid showing Clunie hitting a woman.

‘Chinatoon’ sees the Bogie Man escaping and becoming involved with a protection racket attempting to extort money from Glasgow’s Chinese restaurants, and a romance with complications. It’s created to the same slapstick formula of Clunie inveigling others into his deluded world and causing chaos, yet actually putting a wrong right, a template refined by the plot being a little more straightforward. Smith ensures the hilarity by drawing events as if genuine noir crime, the exaggerations slight and rare, and residents of Glasgow and the surrounding area can spot the local landmarks.

Smith’s a little more generic when it comes to Edinburgh in ‘Return to Casablanca’, produced a decade later, with the same unfortunate villains having the Bogie Man entirely accidentally wreck their people smuggling business after an Albanian refugee escapes. It’s a fond return with some funny moments, especially ridiculous celebrity Rab McNab, but doesn’t hit the peaks of the earlier triumphs. The same applies to ‘Key Largs’ the new epilogue of the Bogie Man escaping to Largs, a small seaside town with the highest per capita percentage of pensioners in Scotland. Six pages is enough to deliver havoc, but not much more.

Since The Bogie Man’s first publication Bogart’s star has diminished, but the stories are constructed so well they ought to resonate for a 2020s audience who have no idea about his film career and can just assume an eccentric personality contrived by Clunie’s illness. Readers familiar with Bogart can admire the clever homages. It’s a little more difficult to comprehend the gloriously rich Scottish dialect adding such atmosphere, but the meaning is generally understandable in context, and if not a full glossary is provided.

Incomplete or not, at its best The Bogie Man is laugh out loud funny as Grant, Wagner and Smith ensure comedy density, rich characters and total mayhem.

As yet this isn’t available via major online booksellers, but the always reliable Gosh Comics have it in stock for the time being.