If Not Superheroes, What? Part X - Funny Animal Comics

After many months of hedging, investigation, speculation, and general confusion on the topic - an unexpected quality of what, at first, seemed like very simple and basic material - the funny animal comic advances into our discussion of the alternatives to superhero comics. Indeed, if one wanted to divide comics readers into an axis during the various heydays of polarized readership, one could find serious, though artificial, points of contention most strongly displayed between the readers of superhero comics in the Marvel editorial model and the funny animal material that once ranged over the industry like the vanished buffalo over the American plains. In general, after all, funny animal material remained mostly unphased by the Silver Age editorial innovations; this calculated aloofness stands as either virtue or vice based on the opinions of the observer. However, if we consider the comics of funny animals as a genre far detached from the increasingly-monolithic superhero comics form, what elements of this genre create the barriers? And, indeed, what constitutes the genre?

By inclination, sometimes we describe funny animal comics as a genre. Does this classification hold? While this category of comics shares certain salient features, especially the use of anthropomorphic animals (or, perhaps, zoomorphic people), can we truly label as a single genre material that can include humor books, science fiction works, superhero material, westerns, adventure stories, or historical/political works? If we, indeed, yield to the temptation to declare funny animal comics a genre, the problem of the genre intersections remains with us. Perhaps for clarity we might defer the question, recognize anthropomorphism of animals as a unifying convention of this material, and acknowledge that we have something that has many, though perhaps not all, the features of a genre. Publishers once specialized in product lines that adhered to the convention, as they might with a genre; readers identified themselves and each other based on their willingness to consider the material, as they might with a genre; talent specialized in the form, very much as they might with a genre; yet the single defining trait fails, unlike previously-described genres (detailed here) to exclude others.

If here we have a genre, we have truly a flexible and permeable one, one that can explore others without compromising its defining features. Could a suitable definition resolve the problem of genre permeability?

A Problem of Definition

We can classify funny-animal comics with a simple feature, a deceptively understandable angle that at one time makes the material both accessible (everyone understands critturs) and detached (the semi-human character provides some distance from material that nonetheless intends to describe us even through the proxies of anthropomorphic animals).

Funny animal strips and books share the convention of having sentient, anthropomorphic creatures interact in a generally, though certainly not always, humorous context. But does this really constitute an entire genre? Some pieces fit the mold of adventure strips (the "Mickey Mouse" strip of the thirties); other pieces approach comedy; yet others dabble in more specialized genres (such as the fusion of funny-animal and sword-and-sorcery in the syncretic concept Cerebus by Dave Sim).

A bit of analysis would suggest that the funny-animal convention crosses, with impunity (or perhaps alacrity) genres at will. For instance, where should one place an underground comic that features funny animals (like Crumb's "Fritz the Cat" stories)? Or a superhero parody featuring funny animals (Shaw and Thomas' Captain Carrot or Gilbert Shelton's Wonder Wart-Hog pieces)? Or a piece of historical comics featuring anthropomorphics (like Art Spiegelman's Maus)? All such pieces unquestionably contain animals who speak, act, and dress like men, or at least like caricatures of men, and all seem to play in distinct genres despite their common features.

Perhaps over-analyzing the problem chases away the view of the whole, much as disassembling a fireplace bellows leaves the amateur scientist with a pile of disconnected parts that, independently, can no longer stoke kindling. Because, although funny animal material does, indeed, exist beyond the boundaries of a single genre, we tend to think of it as an independent and self-contained category, perhaps one whose success has allowed it to spread into other forms of comics.

We can, with a bit of observation, recognize the best-known flavor of anthropomorphic comics as the humorous variety, connected conceptually (and sometimes through shared properties) with the animated cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s such as Disney, Warner, and their peers created. From this core, talent flowed outward; from this vantage, the conventions of funny animal comics became familiar enough that their application outside the expected humor material would not seem especially incongruous.

The Onus of Juvenility

The aversion some grown-ups have to having someone catch them red-handed in some activity or pastime associated with children seems, to me, a morbid distaste for our own children. Perhaps such a stigma of youth served, once, to drag young people, kicking and screaming, into the world of adult responsibilities, and therefore served a functional social purpose. However, imagination seems up to the task of handling the process of social maturation without the need for demonization of age groups to which every living human being must belong before achieving adulthood.

Frequently, the abandonment of all-ages material into some kind of ghettoized cultural classification such as "kid stuff" represents a superficial analysis that overlooks the methods in which a talented creator can render content that has more meaning for adults. Such a pattern applies to the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s, which contained considerable cultural reference to those who bother to look and a number of gags that require some degree of awareness of things wider than comics or cartoons; for instance, consider the Bugs Bunny cartoon with the gremlin and the gremlin's mention of obscure Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. As went certain cartoons, in this case, so, sometimes, did comic strips; and thus in material like "Pogo" you may find the most basic (and arguably unedifying) slapstick gags traveling in the company of valid commentary on human nature through the proxy of talking animals.

Sometimes material justifies the claim of "kid stuff," but frequently the term just serves as a label to excuse a cultivated ignorance. And, if in the face of such dual stigmatization - insulting comics and creators based on the use of youthful appeal as a pejorative term - funny animal cartoonists manage to retain their sense of humor, we can credit them with an abundance of goodwill for folks who do not attempt to understand what they do.

Fabulous Origins

The funny-animal concept owes to a fabulous origin. Not one that defies belief, but literally from models in fables, such as the talking animal in Aesop's fables and other stories of a form owing to folklore typical of Africa, Europe, Asia - indeed, of any continent where a human oral tradition endured prior to the invention, discovery, or imposition of literacy.

Speculative claims about human credulity left to a different argument, let us beg the question that our forefathers did not always take such tales literally, recognizing in the talking and sentient animal a storytelling conceit that served to make the stories transcend considerations of time and ethnicity (though, perhaps, the use of totemic animals held sacred by particular peoples could make such material far more ethnos-specific).

While different people will react in a variety of ways to an identical story, we can credit our cultural antecedents of Aesop's day with sufficient sophistication to understand the hook of such fabulous tales. The animals stand as proxies for human beings, wearing bodies from various rungs of the poetical Ladder of Creation to put suitable distance from ourselves, whom they reflect. Thus disguised, the concealment offers a kind of objectivity. A story about character that features (as a hypothetical example) an ill-tempered bear, after all, can educate about anger in a way that detours around human tendencies to dysfunctional ego-attachment in a way that a tale featuring modern historical figures could not.

This much understood, we can see why La Fontaine might work in animal fables - or James Thurber, or Walt Kelley. Through the proxy of the antropomorphic beast we can show our failings undiluted at the easily-borne cost of some small concealment of our target, and look at virtues and vices with less risk of defensive rationalization.

Daily Strips

Looking for funny animal material of suitably venerable pedigree plus sufficient cultural penetration to have affected the medium might produce more than one result, based on the resources and dedication of the researcher. Recurrently, however, George Harriman's strip "Krazy Kat" comes into the conversation, appearing way, way back in 1910. Assuming a common locus from which funny animal material in the format of printed cartoons might emanate, we could do worse than view the feature detailing the bizarre brick-throwing (and, seemingly, sadomasochistic) relationship entangling Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Officer Pupp.

The funny animal in newspapers frequently acted out various slapstick gags in humorous strips. However, noting the reservations about pigeonholing funny animal material into a single, unified, impermeable genre expressed elsewhere in this column, we can observe that nothing beyond common usage precluded other approaches to linear art depictions of anthropomorphic animals.

The occasional talent with an eye to the possibilities of his material might venture into more ambitious territory than the three-panel formula gag typical of the humor strip from generations past through the present. For instance, in the thirties, the Mickey Mouse daily strip explored an adventure format, despite a cast of anthropomorphic critters, after an early start that featured the sort of slapstick gags one might anticipate of the material in a day before Donald Duck's ascendancy appropriated the edge from the Mickey Mouse concept in print.

In such cases, though, we can note the flow of information. Early printed material such as "Krazy Kat" might have spread the funny animal concept, but another vector seems, generations later, to have played an important role by reaching across media. If the Mickey Mouse strip of the thirties predated the appearance of superhero comics, either in modern-comic format or in daily newspaper strips, many of these animal characters themselves owed to another origin: the animation studios that had begun presenting a variety of unlikely birds and mammals as characters in the 1920s.

The Two-Way Connection to Animation

By the time that what we would, today, consider a comic book had appeared on mass markets in the mid-thirties, animated cartoons had years of history behind them already, meaning that Disney Studios' Oswald the Rabbit (and later creations) had reached audiences since the late 1920s. This head start often created a conceptual flow from animated cartoons to funny animal comics that featured them, and, true to this form, the surviving examples of funny animal comics circa 2001 frequently feature media tie-in material from popular arts purveyors like Warner Brothers.

Animated cartoons and funny animal cartoons mutually fed one another. A comic piece could spawn a cartoon; cartoons did and do spawn comics; and talents sometimes cross from one business to the other. Disney and Harvey ported concept lines from film to comics, and many well-known cartoons at various times experimented with comics titles to complement made-for-television cartoons.

As concepts flowed between film and print, so, too, did talent. Jack Kirby, for instance, came from a role as a fill-in artist on early Popeye cartoons to become one of the luminaries of superhero comics, and, burnt by decades of disagreements in the printed comics business, returned to cartoons through the end of his career.

Given that cartoons enjoy benefit of motion and sound (features that two-dimensional comics must simulate through conventions), one might note that cinema does not always translate perfectly to print, nor vice versa. However, the cinematic character of comics, certainly including funny-animal material, appears in the methods of film; storyboarding, the method of designing the flow of movie scenes through a series of drawn images that interpret a script, has enough in common with cartooning that alumni of comics such as Neal Adams, Frank Miller, and Jim Steranko have plied their trade through creating story boards for movies.

The Famous Shops (and Their System)

For a number of comics publishers, including, once upon a time, National Periodical Publications (DC), creating a solid product line and keeping talent in what management or accountants saw as their place represented a single set of business standards. As a result, much comics material appeared uncredited - indeed, publishers might deliberately conceal who did their best work in order to prevent particular talents' demanding pay commensurate with the attention and revenues they brought to the shop. To varying degrees, companies like DC, Archie, and Disney followed this policy, sometimes well into the seventies when crediting talent became not only standard but recognized as a simple courteous administration of commonly-understood responsibilities.

This led to recognizable product lines where comics and cartoon characters owned the name recognition even if the creators, writers, and delineators remained obscure. More typically we can associate such lines with the animation studios: non-specialists can generally distinguish between a character from a Tex Avery, Warner Brothers, or Disney cartoon.

Since marketing an entertainment concept does better if one can guarantee that it retains some entertainment value, animation studios frequently kept the licensed comics properties in-house. Carl Barks, thus, came from animation to the role of comic strip and comic book artist in duck themes. Animators (understood in the sense of animators of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s), furthermore, tended to have hands-on skills relevant to comics storytelling, at least before the medium sank in some countries to the point of making the mouths move on still pictures.

Talent and Luminaries

One could compose an encyclopedia in the process of attempting to list the principal talents behind the funny animal comic. However, a few names stand out, Carl Barks perhaps the foremost in current esteem. We could include also fathers of the form like George Harriman ("Krazy Kat," 1910); Pat Sullivan ("Felix the Cat"); Sidney Smith ("Old Doc Yak," 1912); Ub Iwerks, Win Smith, Manuel Gonzales, Bill Wright, and Earl Duvall, who worked on the early "Mickey Mouse" strip; Floyd Gottfredson, who raised the "Mickey Mouse" strip to the role of a classic; Ted Thwaites, from the "Donald Duck" strip; Walt Kelly, who created the memorable "Pogo;" and legions of others who deserve mention but whose names tend to escape inclusion in histories of comics owing to the tendency to dismiss funny-animal material from serious consideration.

That funny animal comics also involved a massive talent cross-migration from the animation studios has, in some ways, helped preserve some of the names and credits that impermanent and unanthologized comic book material does not. The studios, furthermore, occasionally produced a talent whose name would not obviously associate with animated properties (for instance, Walt Kelly, who had done some early work for Disney).

The Polymorphousness of it All

The problem of fitting Maus and comics featuring Tex Avery characters into the same genre inspires no small amount of cognitive dissonance. Yet we might see in such disparate pieces a use for the funny animal convention that serves storytelling needs which transcend limitations of genre.

• By postulating improbable and fantastic fusions of human and animal attributes in the principal players of stories, the creators set a tone of unreality which the story may require. This can help tools such as slapstick work by setting ground rules implying the real world does not intrude here; once we accept one kind of impossibility (sentient mammals, reptiles, birds, bugs, and whatever), we have a head start on accepting another (that a brick to the head produces laughter rather than funerals).
• By distancing characters from a clearly human nature, the creators allow themselves to create sometimes-necessary distance in examining the imperfect aspects of the human character. Comedy and tragedy, especially in the Aristotelean sense, revolve around character flaws; and removed somewhat from a reality that imposes unhappy consequences on those who suffer such failings, human folly can appear in a more amusing light. This also allows heavier tales about human character, ranging from Aesop's tales to the modern classic Maus, to advance their message further before the moral lesson alienates an over-sensitive listener or reader.
• By resorting to particular species in the assignment of animal types to particular human(oid) personalities, creators can postulate models of personality based on the salient features of various animals. Creators do not always avail themselves of this opportunity, but we can see in Albert the Alligator the connection of a dangerous carnivore (an alligator) to the human failing of gluttony; and we can see in Foghorn Leghorn the connection of a preening rooster to human vanity.

The nature of these opportunities provided by the funny-animal convention therefore incline not to a narrowing of available storytelling options, as one might see in discussions of previously-examined comics genres (discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but a broadening. So it need not surprise us, in spite of funny animal material having a pronounced center of its bell curve inclined to comedy / slapstick content , that one finds under a broad canopy of feathers, tails, and pointy ears the opportunity for comedy, drama, adventure, superhero material (occasionally), moral tales, or whatever the creator chooses to explore.

Rather than offering the kind of vapid dead-end presumed by critics who do not bother to explore the material, the funny animal convention can, if talent so chooses to employ it, transcend most of the genre boundaries that delimit comics uncritically held in higher esteem.

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Column 278. Completed 06-OCT-2001.

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