Throughout all of these exploits, his image on the Weekly World News remained the same, mouth and eyes open wide, chin raised, nostrils flared. Since his first appearance following his discovery in a West Virginia cave in 1992, he has led police on several chases, evaded and been detained by the FBI, been cloned, fought in the Iraq War, and run for president.
The bald, screeching visage of the half-human, half bat is burned in my memory - fangs, pointy ears, cherubic cheeks, and wide, black eyeballs. Weekly World News was a special kind of dumb fun, and Bat Boy was perhaps its biggest front-page star. You could consider it a print media proto- X-Files, except the stories were so tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top that they held an immediate appeal for a generation steeped in cultural irony and raised on the camp weirdness of John Waters, the slack secrecy of the Church of the SubGenius, and the cult schlock of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Unlike its celebrity-focused neighbors, WWN heralded stories about beasts and supernatural phenomena like Bigfoot, UFOs, mermaid skeletons, and ominous omens. For those who grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, the newsprint tabloid Weekly World News was a steadfast presence in the grocery store checkout aisle.
0 kommentar(er)
