The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1226: Donald Duck #198, August 1978

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from today's comic based on the cover, but it certainly wasn't Biblical epic! King Og was apparently ruler of a nation that Moses and the Israelites conquered. He is mentioned in Deuteronomy, and did, it seems, have an iron bed.

So we have a cute little time travel story in today's issue, but I wonder if it's not actually something more. I wrote a few years back for Sequart.org an article about Christian comics texts. I'd thought through there being different kinds: the faithful adaptation, the "paraphrase," and the paratexts. I wonder if a story like this one, not quite a paraphrase, but an insertion of contemporary pop culture into ancient Jewish tradition, would fit somewhere in there? I'm intrigued, now, by this series. It's said that Carl Barks instituted this tradition of the Duck comics being more adventurous, and slightly more serial, than a typical cartoon adaptation comic (see my thoughts on Bugs Bunny a few days back). It's interesting to see that it was carried on even after Barks' time on the titles.

This is the last of the Western comics I'll be reading for now. I've got a stack of their more serious titles lined up for next month, but we'll finish with Donald, who heralds the coming of another duck character a little later on this month. Of the comics I read this week, Andy Panda and today's comic were the ones that grabbed me most. I'll have to see if I have any more kicking about!

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1225: Tweety and Sylvester #77, January 1978

There's an evolution of the relationship between Tweety and Sylvester in today's comic that I quite like. Don't worry. Sylvester is still trying to eat Tweety, but he's also strangely best friends with him. They hang out, have adventures, and then out of the blue, Sylvester will try to eat Tweety, get defeated, and then they'll keep hanging out. It's very, very weird. And that look on Sylvester's face on the cover makes me wonder how this comic would read if it underwent the Garfield Minus Garfield treatment. What would the tale of a lonely, crazed cat be like?

I've still not come across anything to pull me into these comics, though. I'm not invested in the characters. Well, maybe Andy Panda. He seemed to be a bit savvy.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1224: Chip 'n' Dale #25, Jaunary 1974

I'm starting to think that the reason that I haven't read any Western comics is that they're really pretty unremarkable. Or, the ones that I have are, anyway. So far. (Could I vague that up, do you think?)

I will give the artist of today's issue respect for the facial expressions they manage with cartoon chipmunk physiology. But aside from that, the stories are pretty run of the mill for these characters. They get into mischief. Hijinks ensue.

Okay, one other interesting thing. In the first story, the duo refer to their forest brethren with the honorific "brer," a reference to the Uncle Remus stories, one must think. And that honorific, "Br'er" is short for "brother," and has origins in African Rabbit trickster stories. So there's a weird connection there, though given the use to which we put creatures in funny animal comics, is it really so surprising that there are funny animals in our sacred stories?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1223: Bugs Bunny #213, October 1979

I think the most interesting thing about this comic is that, given the era it's from, it's surprisingly not racist when the action moves to a foreign country.

That aside, it was pretty meh. Bugs is an interesting character, but I often feel he's the sort that would really flourish if you could just let him be a bit darker, for there to be just a bit more bite to his humour. But then, I suppose that's what a lot of the other funny animal characters do, Howard for example. They take the genre into that place that Bugs never seems to go.

Though, I haven't read a lot of Bugs Bunny comics, so I really don't know for sure.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1222: Walter Lantz - Andy Panda #17, January 1977

I recently re-organized my collection, an endeavour about which I'll have more to say at a later date. One of the things I came across during this task was the rather large amount of Western/Gold Key/Whitman comics I have. A large majority of them belong to my wife, who graciously allowed me to fold them into the collection (it must be love!), so reading them is doubly interesting, as I can imagine my wife as a child having read these very same comics. And before I wax Benjaminian on texts and memory, for me it is a connection to a version of her that I never knew, and that's kind of cool.

The other realization I came to, however, is that I've never read any of them. I honestly can't think of one (okay, maybe one) that I've read. So I decided that once my Pride Month reads were over, I'd jump headfirst into some Western Publishing stuff and get an idea of what was going on there. They're a venerable publisher but I think were one that very much believed in the comics are for kids ethos of the medium. Maybe that's why I've never taken to them. But later this month we'll be reading some Howard the Duck, a series I consider to be the apotheosis of funny animal comics, and Western's a nice place to go to see some other articulations of that genre in action. Like today's comic.

Andy Panda was fun and it's humour just intelligent enough to keep me entertained. It's definitely a children's comic, but not one that necessarily is interested in talking down to the kids. Andy and Charlie Chicken hatch schemes and thwart plots - they're more adventurers than they are comedic buffoons, a la Porky Pig, perhaps. I find the funny animal genre fascinating, in that the anthropomorphization of animals is a long-standing mythic tradition, and I wonder what it means when we start using them as stand-ins not for our deities, but for ourselves. I'm sure I'll keep pondering this over the rest of the month.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 728: The Little Monsters #33, April 1976

A couple of years ago I taught Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to one of my classes. In one of the lectures, I gave them examples of how Shelley's Monster has become a staple of our popular culture. It's a pity I didn't have this comic at the time.

That said, there's some weird problems with this comic. First is the really horrendous forced puns. "You're so terror-bly thoughtful." "Bad-bye." I mean, I get it, and very likely the demographic this comic is aimed at would love it, but I'm certainly not that demographic.

The second thing is a little more serious. It seems like the entire monster family lives in perpetual fear of their grumpy father. And not just grumpy. When he's angry, he kicks the kids around and yells, and they all dive for cover to avoid his tantrums. Again, I kind of see where this comes from, in that he's a proxy for Frankenstein's Monster, but there's something downright chilling about the reactions of his family toward his anger, and his reactions toward them. It's behaviour I can't see being accepted as comedy in a contemporary comic. Which, I suppose, is one of the most interesting things about this project I'm pursuing. As popular culture artefacts, comics tend to reflect quite explicitly what was going on in the culture at the time of their creation. You simply have to look at the push toward representation in today's comics to see that clearly. So each time I come across something culturally bizarre in a comic, I'm reminded of how quickly, and sometimes how slowly, culture changes. I can only imagine, 20 or 30 years from now, what the comics of today will look like.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 719: Porky Pig #2, May 1965

Who the heck is Cicero Pig? He's apparently Porky's roommate, but, later on in this comic, they share a bed at their new house. It's interesting to me that I make the assumption that everything I've seen on television as far as the Looney Tunes characters go is all that there is to them. That would be like someone doing the same for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I suppose. The comics world of such characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and today's star Porky, are just as vast and varied, if not as continuity-bound, as any other transmedial universe. I balk occasionally at reading, or buying, these old cartoon-based comics. For some reason I assume that they're going to be simple and boring for an adult reader, which is a totally unfair judgment for me to lay on them. The writers of these comics might have been trying to appeal to a particular demographic, but they were still adults writing stories that, hopefully, kept them entertained. Perhaps I have to delve into my Gold Key kids comics a bit more in the next year of the project.

There's an excellent wrap-up of Cicero's career here, offering the unfortunate information that at different times, he's been both Porky's nephew and Petunia's cousin. Um.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 294: Mighty Mouse #164, July 1965

I'll always pick up a Mighty Mouse comic when I see one for cheap. The 90s Marvel series is hilarious and clever, and a few of the older ones I've read a quite weird and sinister. Sadly, such is not the case with this issue. The stories are both pretty formulaic, and actually depict Mighty Mouse as kind of psychotically violent. Though ostensibly a riff on Superman, the Mouse of Might has very little compunction over killing the "Bird of Doom" on the cover, even though it was an innocent creature put to use by MM's nemeses.

I will spare a few words for the second feature, in which Mighty Mouse patrols a jungle, saving "innocent" creatures from the more violent ones (though technically he's starving the poor python and crocodile). The worst part of this story is the horrendously racist depiction of the natives in the jungle. Stuff like this just makes me uncomfortable.

There is one panel in this issue that really struck me. It's just a really nicely laid out, and offers some nice emotion and atmosphere.

I should have noted that this comic came from a batch of dollar bin stuff I picked up on the weekend. I'm going to blog my way through it for the next few days.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 121: The Addams Family #1, October 1974

It doesn't quite look like Charles Addams' early 20th century work, nor the television show upon which Hanna Barbera based their cartoon. This was a weird one. I feel like it couldn't really decide what it wanted to be: domestic-goth comedy or children's cartoon. Not that I'm claiming that the two are mutually exclusive, but they have to be combined with slightly more finesse than this comic. There were times where it felt like a cartoon (Gomez floating in a swamp, relaxing, still dressed in his full suit), and times when it felt like it wanted to be a weird psychedelic comic (the nesting Boola-Boola), and times when it seemed to want to be a proto-Vertigo comedy comic, something along the lines of Nevada or Vamps. I'm not surprised that the series lasted only 3 issues, and I'm curious as to how long the cartoon was popular. Having only very recently read Addams' original cartoons, I'm just not quite sure how this comic, and its animated predecessor, really have very much in common with the dark, parodic roots from whence they sprung.

It does, however, give us this aforementioned panel, which really makes it all worth it in a strange, surreal kind of way:

Yes, that appears to be a stoned, furry, rainbow-coloured octopus keeping its rainbow-coloured eggs warm on dry land. There's really not much more I can say.

See you tomorrow!