Initially, before writing this, I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why it is that we anthropomorphize animals. I mean, I understand that we anthropomorphize just about everything - we're a very self-involved species. But usually that's simply a case of naming a car, or giving a voice to the inner workings of our cats' brains. There is, however, this subset of comics, not quite a genre, that replaces human protagonists with humanized animals. Indeed, this is one of the oldest ways of telling stories in comics, at least in the periodically-distributed pamphlets we've come to know and love. But the question of why we do it is much harder to answer.
Stan Sakai's "Usagi Yojimbo" is always lovely to read. One of the most unsettling parts of any "funny animal" book is when the book stops being funny and gets grim, and Sakai's work straddles that line expertly. This straddling hearkens back to tales that, in some ways, explain the propensity to continue writing funny animal comics - myths. It is difficult to find a popularly available Native American myth that does not feature an anthropomorphized animal of some sort. The same goes for Hindu myths, Japanese myths, in fact, most myth cycles except for the Abrahamic faiths. I think the reason for this popularity of animals in kerygmatic stories is that we can layer our own human foibles and personalities over top of these creatures, but we can also layer the more savage and wild aspects of such creatures over ourselves. In some ways, telling funny animal stories is a way of acknowledging that we, too, are animals.
Once we've come around to that perspective, things start to fall into place a little more. In "Birthright," the final story of this piece, the savagery of politics is portrayed through the fall of an animal-run empire. Cutey Bunny, Joshua Quagmire's piece in this comic, combines the uninhibited sexuality of the animal kingdom (in the form of the buxom Bunny herself) with the animalistic (what does that word even mean?) brutality of the Second World War. Sakai's story is the least savage, in that Usagi laughs and jokes with his comrades, but he also viciously slaughters a group of mercenaries. These animals are not just animals, but people, just as people are not just people, but also animals.
So perhaps that's why this genre...style...continues. Our myths tells us tales about the times when the difference between animal and human was not so vast. Our funny animal books remind us that that gap is still small, regardless of what we might like to think of ourselves as a species.
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