Inspired by the dinosaur artist Bill Stout and Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's LITTLE ANNIE FANNY strip (pun intended) in PLAYBOY, Budd Root's 19-year-old Meriem Cooper (aka Cavewoman) has been battling dinosaurs and other monsters from the Cretaceous period since 1993. One should also notice that King Kong was an inspiration as well, as Meriem Cooper sounds an awful lot like she could be the daughter of Kong filmmaker Merian C. Cooper!
Root explains her beginnings:
"Cavewoman was inspired by Little Annie Fanny and William Stout. I wanted something like "Little Annie Fanny in the Stone Age". Originally, it was going to be a T&A type of book, but it seemed like, as I was writing, it just kept on developing. Then my grandfather died after I wrote it. He had been diagnosed with some kind of inoperable tumor, and it made me think: "I'm not going to do a T&A book. Let's keep this respectable". I brought the pages (to the first issue) to show Gramp just about a week or so before he died."
That thought didn't seem to last long as gradually Meriem lost more and more of her leopard-skin bikini, especially when Devon Massey was drawing her (Root drew a lot of her series comics and Massey draws the lion's share of her one-shots).
With 300 different issues under her knife-belt, Cavewoman would be 39 now, but she hasn't seemed to have aged a day, especially taking into account gravity -- if you know what I mean and I think you do! This particular issue contains cover-to-cover Meriem sans bikini so I've elected to post it HERE instead of on the main page. You'll see what I'm talking about -- CAVEWOMAN: DEEP WATER gives new meaning to "Adult Swim"!
Cavewoman is published by AMRYL ENTERTAINMENT.
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| Vampire Girl by Budd Root (2002). |
I have several early Cavewoman comics in my collection. I really liked Root's artwork, as it quickly became more polished. I came for the Kong connections, but didn't miss the attractiveness of the heroine. She was much more interesting in the early days, when she was just a girl with boobs, and not a set of giant boobs with a girl attached.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. And I'll admit they can be a distraction.
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