Barry Ween

Cover of the second issue
Character information
First appearance	The Adventures of Barry Ween: Boy Genius vol. 1 (March 1999)
Created by	Judd Winick
Publication information
Publisher	Image Comics Oni Press
Schedule	vol. 1 and 2.0 Monthly Monkey Tales Bimonthly
Formats	Original material for the series has been published as a set of limited series and one-shot comics.
Genre	Superhero
Publication date	1999 – 2002
Number of issues	vol. 1 3 2.0 3 Monkey Tales 6
Main character(s)	Barry Ween Jeremy Ramirez Sara Tan, Roxie
Creative team
Writer(s)	Judd Winick
Artist(s)	Judd Winick
Creator(s)	Judd Winick
Reprints
Collected editions
Volume 1	ISBN

The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius is a comic book metaseries created, written and illustrated by Judd Winick. It follows the comical escapades of the eponymous character, a 10-year-old boy who secretly possesses the most powerful intellect on Earth, along with his impulsive best friend Jeremy and his crush Sara. Barry puts his genius to work primarily in creating outlandish inventions that are centuries ahead of their time, such as teleportation devices, jetpacks and wallet-sized nuclear devices. Many of the storylines involve one of Barry's inventions going horribly wrong (usually due to Jeremy's clumsiness) and the two boys' efforts to right the situation before anyone can find out. Barry takes great care to keep his genius a secret and maintains Jeremy as his only confidant. The pair's dialogue is rife with profanity, often complex in its construction, and this foul-mouthed irreverence is reflected to a lesser extent in several of the other characters.

Barry Ween's adventures were first published in a three-issue mini-series by Image Comics in 1999. Oni Press picked up the title for two additional miniseries: three issues in 2000, and six issues in 2001 and 2002. The most recent issue was released in February 2002. For a time Winick's website listed Barry Ween: Boy Genius in Space as an upcoming work, which after being on hiatus for 8 years has recently been announced to be in progress.

Barry is ten years old and by far the smartest organism on the planet. No explanation is ever provided for his vast intellect, although the first issue begins with Barry stating that "I was smart even before birth, and I'm not talking a little smart. I mean way smart, like, self-awareness-in-the-womb-smart." He is an extremely prolific inventor and has built an immense secret lair underneath his suburban home full of robots, futuristic transports, and weapons. Due to his knowledge of the workings of the human body, he is exceptionally skilled at hand-to-hand combat. Despite his genius, however, Barry is prone to making errors in his experiments that can lead to near-catastrophic consequences, like turning his aunt into an enormous deformed blob, knocking the Earth out of the sun's orbit, or accidentally creating an inter-dimensional rift in his basement. He copes with his unusual lifestyle by adopting a sardonic sense of humor and a thinly veiled contempt for most of his schoolmates. Despite the great power that his intelligence grants him, he admits later in the series that his superior mind is a kind of curse: he can't stop thinking, calculating probabilities, and formulating plans; so he never sleeps. In fact, he attends school because he believes social interaction will slow his descent into madness.