Take W.C. Fields and add a bit of Texas charm, plus what is likely the inspiration for Krusty the Klown, and you get Cowboy Wally. He's a huge, garish, brazen, but likeable guy who doesn't realize that his own ineptness is what endears him to his audience. You'll either love him or hate him, but either way you're going to laugh yourself silly reading the Cowboy Wally Show.
Written and drawn by Kyle Baker in 1988 (at an early stage in his cartooning career), Chapter one of the 128 page looseleaf sized comic is a pseudo documentary of the fictional Cowboy Wally's career. Beginning with how he weasled a t.v. producer into giving him his own show (using rather compromising photos), Wally and the interviewer travel in a most hilarious manner through all the highs and lows of the big man's career. Sprinkled throughout along the way are "clips" of the various projects Cowboy Wally has been involved in, including his children's show (which became his prime-time adult natured show after one episode), his role with the senate subcommittee on morality, his first film Ed Smith: Lizard of Doom, and the birth (and subsequent death) of WBN, the Wally Broadcasting Network... all Wally starring or produced shows all of the time.
Leading into the second chapter, the interviewer brings up Wally's first big success, his second film "Sands of Death". We are treated to a "screening" of what can basically be described as Lawrence of Arabia meets Woody Allen. Sands of Death follows a group of dispondent, lovelorn soldiers in France who learn the true meaning of manliness after killing a large group of opponents. If I were to describe the film on it's own merits, I'd have to simply say, "Goddamn funny."
A brief interview passage bridges the first and second chapter to the third, the "screening" of Wally's follow up to the wildly popular Sands of Death: "the Making of Hamlet". The Making of Hamlet is a documentary along the premise of "A Day in the Life of Cowboy Wally". During that day, Wally has a meeting with his partner and star of Sands of Death Lenny Walsh as well as two studio honchos who give the pair a huge budget to make a film in under two weeks. Following the meeting Wally and Lenny find themselves in jail (had a bit too much to drink) where they decide they should shoot the film. Wally writes a script adapting Shakespeare's Hamlet with modern day language, and using a cast of four (Wally and Lenny, and their two cellmates), some smuggled victorian costumes, a few paper cutouts, and a hidden camera, they present the funniest and most shocking version of the Bard's famous tale.
A brief segue between Wally and the new interviewer (the other interviewer having been fired in the previous segue) leads to the presentation of one of the wackiest late-night talk show episodes ever in "Cowboy Wally's Late Night Celebrity Showdown". In this episode, Wally is joined by a now famous ex-classmate, his disgruntled ex-announcer, and a man whose life he ruined and now wants to pay back the favor (by dying live on his show). It's the most madcap of guests I imagine even Conan O'Brien wouldn't touch.
Honestly, The Cowboy Wally Show is the funniest thing I've read in a long time, and it deserves much more exposure and recognition than it has been given (it's ten years old and I just heard of it earlier this year). Kyle Baker has a very wry sense of humour in this work, most of the time in your face comedy, but there's also a lot of subtility to it (mostly conveyed in truly remarkable characatures and facial expressions). The book reads more like a screenplay enhanced with storyboards, and by any means this could easily be one of the best comedy films ever made. The only disappointment I have with the Cowboy Wally Show is that it took me so long to discover it.