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How many Betty Boops have I sighted in my six years of squeezing through the crowds of New York Comic Con? Less than that one time I spied a Green Knight Gawain cosplayer from Dave Lowery’s film. 

Most might casually recognize Betty Boop, a Jazz Age flirty icon, in her oversized head of pouty lips, red flapper getup, hoop earrings, and coquettish baby voice that scats “Boop boop de boop.” The vintage icon swished her hips and flirted her way in a line-up of then-innovative '30s Fleischer Studios cartoon shorts, and also carrying its own sordid history of Indigenous, Black, and AA+PI stereotypes. Other than a French make-up commercial, Betty hasn’t been seen in fully-fledged projects in the 21st century, until a lavish Broadway musical Boop! (music by David Foster, lyrics by Susan Birkenhead, and book by Bob Martin), a Jerry Mitchell-directed transfer from a Chicago run, chugs along.

But how do you integrate Betty Boop into our modern age? The musical answers that by hurling her into the dizzying Jacob K. Javits Convention Center-based New York Comic Con (thanks to scenic designer David Rockwell), a mise-en-scène that lends the musical a meta about the musical's creators endeavoring to grant a novel dimension for an old-fashioned 2-D icon in the current age. It’s a little like a fan of a niche fanbase tuning out their artistic role with a unique spin that honors the past and modifies for the present. 

How Betty Boop Got Into New York Comic Con

To first explain how this Broadway Betty Boop ended up at NYCC: Betty Boop (played by triple-threat Jasmine Amy Rogers) is fatigued of her fame in her black-and-white bouncy Fleischer-realm ToonTown, and maybe exhausted of starring in cartoons where she’s mostly an object to be gazed at and chased. The black-ink it-girl resolves to find a dimension where she isn’t famous and maybe for a change. So when her Grampy (Stephen DeRosa, channeling Back to the Future’s Doc Brown) invents a teleportation armchair, she skidaddles out into the real world in a Barbie-esque Heroine’s Journey where a journey of self-actualization and human connection awaits her.

In a dizzyingly choreographed transition, Betty Boop’s black-and-white dancers are swapped with Comic Con attendees. To Broadway oldheads – at least those with no taste for comic cons – who might bristle at references and decry them as desperate on a Broadway stage that calls for professional polish, the array of pop cultural getups may register as a gaucherie eyesore (I wondered how much the pop cultural imagery maybe required copyright-gymnastics on costume designer Greg Barnes’s part). But if you ever bucked against the river of fans, any Comic Con attendee might acclimate to the overstimulation. As a lady now plucked out of her black-and-white domain, Betty is disoriented by all the rainbow of cosplayers, including the sunny Pikachu hoodie, Scarlet Witch, Sailor Moon, and the practically pink Elle Woods (a reference to Legally Blonde: The Musical).

The New York Comic Con setting goes beyond a gag at Betty Boop gasping at a Pikachu. Betty’s ensuing 'In Color' musical number pays homage to the flashiness and handmade inventiveness of the Comic Con fandom space, galore with sight gag like Cyclops beaming a laser in the shape of a heart and a cosplayer performing a quick change from a cardboard Poké Ball to a sultry Gardevoir dress. “It's home in color!” an over-the-moon Betty exalts, Rogers’ eyes so wide you could practically imagine them stretching out of the sockets like a real cartoon. 

How New York Comic Con shows its colorful self in BOOP! The Musical

A comic con–on its best behavior–is a safe space of reinvention and belonging. The setting is also the musical’s way of placing Betty Boop in an intergenerational community of cartoons, like SpongeBob SquarePants, Goofy, and Raggedy Ann & Andy, cartoon luminaries that spring with visual vernacular of the Fleischer era. In the Chicago run, a sighting of a Superman cosplayer (seemingly replaced in the Broadway version as a caped Thor cosplayer striking a flying pose that may as well be Superman-influenced), among other D.C. and Marvel cosplayers, may remind an animation scholar that Fleischer Studios animated the colored Superman series in the 1940s. Even modern Pokémon did a Fleischer-inspired PokéToon short. (The audience at my showing just hungered to capture Betty’s dog Pudgy, puppeteered by marionette artist Phillip Huber, into a Poké Ball.)

Even as the scene suggests that modern cartoons are indebted to Betty’s Fleischer guardians, the comic con also emphasizes her old-timey alienation in the world. To be clear, just because I haven’t ever seen Betty Boop cosplayers in the flesh, doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but a Betty Boop cosplay would fall into one of those narrower niches among the legions of Jedi, Sith, Marvel, DC-based heroes and villains (although New York Comic Con and other comic cons have hosted 'Max Fleischer Restoration' panels). Which whirls us back to the Broadway musical’s journey to fit Betty Boop into today’s world.

If New York Comic Con can be an origin story for fandom friendships, the musical ties Betty Boop’s arc with the Betty Boop fangirl, Trisha (Angelica Hale) an aspiring artist and orphan who lives with her foster mother (Anastacia McCleskey) and adult brother Dwayne (Ainsley Melham). Trisha just happens to love drawing Betty Boop. Even as lyricist Birkenhead seems at a loss to convey Trisha’s hyper fixation on Betty Boop in 'Portrait of Betty,' a generic fan ballad song lacking persuasive textures, it does land on one simple lyric “She’s all the things I'm not," the same way any fan might declare their Leia Organa, their Wonder Woman, their Harley Quinn as their beacon. Hale is good at conveying the relatable vibe of a stan who clings to her cartoon icon to weather her insecurities, and she also voices a particular insight in Act II: “Betty is not just a drawing. Betty is a symbol!... You mean different things to different people.” And although initially insecure about living up to her fangirl’s admiration, Betty comes to welcome that dimension of her fame and it helps her move forward. It’s worth being someone’s inspiration.

Boop! searches for identity to a mixed effect with the musical’s muddled script structure, and I especially felt the musical was indecisive about reconciling Betty Boop’s pre-Hays or Hays Code vibe (the musical itself explicitly references a “before the Code” time). But one heartwarming thing the musical does get is Betty and her fangirl being each other’s rock. This communion of inspiration sounds at home at North America's biggest comic convention, New York Comic Con.

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