The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1339: Critters #9, February 1987

So Tom Stazer's "Lionheart" is going to have to be tracked down. Fortunately, I find that Critters tends to show up in a lot of bargain bins. I'm not sure why. The quality of the stories is simply excellent.

All of the stories in today's issue are really good, very enjoyable and amusing without devolving into the slapstick we might expect from the more juvenile iterations of this genre. This episode of "Lionheart" reminds me of the more hallucinatory issues of the early Cerebus stories, particularly the ones where he's surfing through a mindscape talking to Suentis Po.

(Uh-oh. Got a sudden inkling to re-read Cerebus.)

I'm also intrigued by Freddy Milton's "Gnuff," so hopefully there'll be a bit more of that in subsequent issues.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1337: Critters #7, January 1987

Another cool entry into the funny animal genre, offering a Danish strip about Gnuff (an alligator, perhaps?), an unsurprisingly surreal 2-pager from Sam Keith, and a really great Usagi Yojimbo story about a blind outlaw.

I've thought long and hard about the funny animal genre. At one time, Howard the Duck was going to figure into a line of thinking I'd been pursuing, and I became curious about his lineage outside of stuff like Disney or Looney Tunes. I ended up reading some Pogo, and dipping my toes into the more explicit furry adult comics, all in an effort to understand why we anthropomorphize, and why we keep telling stories using animals. I mean, we've been doing it for so, so long.

That, however, is a question, and quest, for another time. I'm going to keep reading through Critters, though, so perhaps an answer, or a suggestion, will present itself.

More to come...