The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1365: Wild Animals #1, December 1982

A note on the GCD listing for this comic tells us that much of the content was actually created in 1977-78, and was for some reason not published until 4 years later. At one point, one of the characters is told that he's in an underground comic, and there is the feel of an underground to this book, more so than some of the other anthropomorphic comics I've read. But I can see the anthro (we're just gonna shorten that word for the next little while ;D) genre growing from the undergrounds, of course. I think what happens not too long after this transitional era is the influence of manga and anime enters anthro, and forever changes it.

I know I've probably said it before on this blog, but Grant Morrison's Animal Man #5 changed the way I looked at comics in a pretty fundamental way. One of the things it really did was make me view the animal avatars in our entertainment in different ways. Frye suggests that comic strip characters in the Fifties are frozen, unable to evolve, and so too are cartoon animal characters. In some ways it's a more tragic frozenness, as the characters themselves are so often animated.

(Having just typed that, I realize I'm actually describing superheroes too. *sigh* It's one of those points one which Frye and I disagree!)

All this aside, this comic was really pretty great. There's some stuff by Larry Gonnick, Scott Shaw!, Sergio Aragones, just a fantastic array of really, really talented artists. The stories are funny and witty, and I think there was only one questionable ethnic representation, which is actually pretty good given the time period it comes from. Sadly, there are no other issues in the series. Though perhaps that's a good thing. Nothing to add to the collecting list!

More to come...

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...