A Nightmarish SF Epic, Starring Andy 'n' Charlie: The Mighty Mites, "Four Color" #198, 1948

Remember "The Secret Six," the intense, ultra-dark Oswald Rabbit story from 1945? (It was posted here last year--well worth the effort to locate, if you've got the time.)

Here is its twin--one of John Stanley's final "Four Color" books featuring the Walter Lantz characters. "The Mighty Mites," from late 1948, is devoid of all but the darkest, dryest black humor.



Loaded with Stanley "tells"--floating eyes in blackness, morbid themes (including a jaw-droppingly grim finale, made all the darker for its casual, conversational delivery), ZAZzes galore, windmill action, SFX in speech balloons--"Mighty Mites" may qualify as the darkest Stanley Story of the 1940s.

Grim as "The Secret Six" is, it's leavened with light comedy, and trades on the sexual ambiguity of Oswald Rabbit and his domestic partner, Toby Bear.

Fellow dompars Andy Panda and Charlie Chicken have no time for comedy in this breathless, EC-like intense story of a mad scientist, living alone in a rambling house out in the middle of nowhere.

It starts on a dark and stormy night... well, take 15 minutes and just read this thing. Then we'll talk...


































Morgan is one hell of a disturbing villain. He has no motivation for his actions. Sure, one of his victims mentions that Morgan wants to be "king of the world," but his scheme of shrinking every being on the planet to "four inches--or SMALLER!" would take several lifetimes. There would have to be chartered busses bringing large groups of people around the clock, for years and years, for Morgan to attain his dark goal.

What chain of events led him to (a) develop the shrink-ray and (b) lure unsuspecting chumps into his remote forest home, whereupon he (c) shrinks them and collects them in bird cages while (d) actually believing he can rule the entire world?

In the best tradition of sociopathy, Morgan's outward persona is bland, ineffectual and even cordial. Although everything about his homestead screams WARNING! PSYCHOTIC LOSER! AM-SCRAY!, etc., his apparent affable, cheery facade disarms his victims.

This isn't the first time Stanley has invested the villain of a story with more interest than its alleged heroes. In this case, bland, low-key Andy and Charlie are, initially, evenly matched in the vanilla personality of Morgan.

A repeated nightmare image in Stanley's work involves a commonplace item--a bed, a house--sinking into the ground. (Check out the first story I ever posted here, "The Guest in the Ghost Hotel," from Tubby #7, for another vivid rendition of this theme.)

Morgan's house, filled with retracting panels, secret passages, and even a light rail line, is clearly a labor of insane love. One can imagine the years it took this guy to design and build this nightmare castle out in the sticks.

A stronger pair of protagonists might upstage a bad guy like Morgan. It is to this story's benefit that panda and chicken are so lackluster and ordinary. As the evident madness of Morgan's world slowly dawns on our heroes, a deeply disturbing facet of Morgan surfaces.

It isn't just that he traps people and shrinks and collects them--he takes out his rage on them. "He'll TORTURE us--he always does when he's angry," as one of Morgan's early victims exclaims, after Andy and Charlie shoot him in the big toe with his own gun.

Just enough is said to fill the reader's mind with the many sessions of torment the little people have endured before the time-frame of this story. Brrr!

"The Mighty Mites," from its misleading title onward, lacks many specific details. An obvious twin to this story is Carl Barks' "The Terror of the River," from 1946. Barks' story also has a sociopathic villain with elaborate equipment, for the express goal of scaring the daylights out of people.

Barks' story is full of down-to-earth anecdotes and experiences--of life on a riverboat, of the atmosphere of the water and the night, and of the foibles of funny-animal "humanity."

Stanley, by not crossing Ts or dotting Is, creates an inescapable, relentless state of nightmare in "The Mighty Mites." Nothing has much meaning--as in a bad dream, events just happen, and the protagonist bobbles in the wake of these random actions.

As is proper in the mad-scientist genre, the creator's evil creation proves his own undoing. And, in time-tested heroic fashion, Andy risks all to run back in the collapsing, flaming Morgan residence to rescue the villain, now reduced to canary size.

In the confusion, Morgan is lost. This leads Charlie to comment, in a masterpiece of understatement, "it's like looking for a lost golf ball."

Andy and Charlie only discover Morgan's fate via the afternoon newspaper: "Shortly afterwards, a neighbor reports finding his cat playing with a little suit of clothes and pair of shoes..."

Stanley lets his grimmest conclusions happen from afar. As with the fate of the evil industrialist in "The Secret Six," Morgan's death gains impact from its dispassionate depiction.

This is one way that Stanley routinely got away with stunningly grim finales. Since it's not visually depicted, and since only older, more literate readers could read the speech balloons and connect the dots, "The Mighty Mites" is, technically, still wholesome reading matter for the kiddies.

I admire Stanley's canny ability to work the system to his own benefit. "The Mighty Mites" packs as much horror and weirdness as a year's run of Tales From The Crypt--only it's executed with an adroitness and matter-of-factness the EC comix never achieved.

I hope this story properly rattled your cage. I am sorry that Stanley stopped writing these "Four Color" adventures. The combination of his imagination and the bland licensed characters, in stories such as this, are devastating.

"What a Caricature He Is!"--John Stanley at the Fleischer Studios, 1935

This grade-A scoop arrives courtesy of award-winning animator Bob Jacques, whose Popeye Animator ID blog [see HERE] is an invaluable piece of animation research and history.

I believe that Stanley mentioned his employment at the Max Fleischer animation studios in New York City in the mid-1930s. Well, here's visible proof of his presence, from an issue of Fleischer's Animated News [Vol. 1 #6, May 1935].

Those of us with access to Another Rainbow's flawed-but-beloved Little Lulu Library will recall that some Stanley-drawn caricatures, from our man's high school yearbook, were reproduced.

The image below reminds me of the days, lo, some 30 years ago, when I discovered, in the musty bowels of Strozier Library, at Florida State University, a complete run of Fleischer's Animated News on microfilm.

I pored over those reels, but never took notes (hey, I was a teenager at the time!). I wonder if those microfilms are still there. If they've not degraded, I urge any Northern Florida-based Stanley Stories readers to go into the library's basement and request those three or four boxes of reels.

This is very likely reproduced from microfilm. Fleischer's Animated News was hectographed, and I'm guessing that the artists who did the illustrations drew their stuff directly on the hectograph masters.



Here we see Stanley take some good-natured pot shots at Fleischer colleagues Dave Tendlar (spelled "Tendler" here for reasons unknown), Tom Johnson, Frank Paiker, and a guy named Hastings, whose first name escapes me...

These are great caricatures. I especially like Tom Johnson's, which looks like a sinister type, as envisioned by Gluyas Williams.

Tendlar and Johnson stayed with the studio for decades, long after Fleischer became Famous Studios, and ushered in an era of baroque violence and cartoons that, in their own way, are every bit as bizarre and unsettling as the pre-Code output of the Fleischer concern.

I would wager that there are more John Stanley pieces in other issues of FAN. Were that I was not thousands of miles (and, metaphorically, thousands of years) from dear old Tallahassee, I'd be the first in line to hunch over the microfilm viewer, in the air-conditioned darkness, and pore over this faskinatin' publication.

As said: any FSU readers of this blog? If so, care to make a research trip to Strozier Library? Drop me a line--let's talk!

Tubby's Last Hurrah: Three stories from Stanley's final issue, 1959

Has the dust settled? Can we get back to business?



















OK...

The fall of 1959 saw the end of John Stanley's tenure on the Little Lulu family of titles. I don't have any Lulus after #128; Stanley's final issue was #135, published in September, 1959.

I do have his final Tubby. Nowadays, if a comix creator of Stanley's caliber were to leave a long-running series, the publisher would create a media hoo-hah. Covers would be plastered with the sad [but marketable] news. It would be a big deal.

In 1959, it was just the cost of doin' business. Without a whit of ceremony, Stanley exited, stage right, into Dell's highly similar Nancy comix.

Between 1945 and '59, Stanley must have written at least 1,000 Lulu-family stories [probably more]. A certain exhaustion began to set in as the '50s wound to a close.

Yet inspiration never left Stanley, despite his having made more spins on the series formula than a dryer in a Bronx laundromat. Anyone would have been ready for a change by this time.

The three stories selected for today's post show major Stanley themes of the 1950s, in their final manifestations. While not daisy-fresh, these pieces still show a lot of life.

Here's the cover; oh, those reassuring Dell covers!



Our first story, "A Record Performance," trades on Tubby's absolute non-mastery of the violin--and the agony its shrieking sounds inflicts on the world around him. As ever, Tubby is proud of his playing, and convinced that it's the finest gift he could bestow on anyone.

Though his efforts are thwarted, they pay off at story's end. I wish we could see the book that Tubby's so excited to read--and I hope he enjoyed it thoroughly!

This story also features the rivalry of Tubby and Wilbur Van Snobbe--key exponent of Stanley's hatred of the rich. Wilbur's extravagance ends up as an enabler to Tubby's well-intentioned but tunnel-visioned gift to his would-be girl, Gloria.










Less subdued is "Whale Tale," co-starring one of Stanley's more controversial creations--seemingly senile Gran'pa Feeb.

Feeb is an uncomfortable character. As such, he is a harbinger of Stanley's 1960s comix, which teem with incidents and characters that cause unease. Feeb is in his second (or is it third?) childhood, and although his pursuits are childish, he recalls his past adult life enough to be a sort-of mentor for Tubby and his clubhouse pals.

The kids clearly like Gran'pa Feeb, and have a good time hanging out with him. With this character, Stanley pushed into edgy territory. Are we laughing at Feeb, the dotty, senile old coot? Or are we laughing with him--applauding his anarchic lifestyle, and his nose-thumbing of the "thin crust of civilization" [John Buchan's words] that the kids' parents cling to with such quiet desperation?

Tub and his friends see through a lot of Feeb's blandishments and boasts, but they genuinely accept him as a mentor and peer.

Feeb features prominently in the fantastically edgy 100-page special, Tubby and his Clubhouse Pals, which Dell published in 1956. My copy is too fragile to scan; I hope Dark Horse will reprint this unsung gem of black comedy in their promised Tubby reprint series.







Lastly, "Green Thumb" offers the potent combo of a Tubby nightmare and those resourceful allies from outer space, The Little Men From Mars. My friend Paul Tumey will do a guest-post here, soon, on TLMFM, so I won't go into detail on them in this post.

This story is a faint echo of earlier, more harrowing works such as "The Guest In The Ghost Hotel" and prior LMFM stories, which teem with life-or-death imagery and moments of extreme threat to life and limb.

This is a quiet farewell to TLMFM, and to Tubby's hyper-active imagintion and sub-conscious. With its equally faint echoes of "Jack and the Bean-Stalk," this story also touches on Stanley's love of fairy-tales and classic fantasy elements. His ability to weave these influences into the most mundane situations was among his great gifts as a story-teller.

I feel badly for 1959 kids who read this issue. They had no idea who John Stanley was, or that he was leaving the world of Lulu. Having read the post-Stanley issues, I can attest that they are, at best, a disappointment; at worst, they're mere product--something that can not be said about even Stanley's weakest work as a comix creator.

Jeet Heer responds re D + Q's Melvin Monster book

Jeet Heer offered some thoughts on the editorial thinking behind the new Drawn + Quarterly John Stanley Library books.

He was not involved with the editorial decisions on this series, but he has spoken with some of the individuals who put these books together.

What he has to say makes sense to me. It also clears up any misgivings adult readers might have about these books.

Please read Jeet's words and consider them...

I think the MM book is a great kids book. I have witness[ed] a few families I know who are really enjoying it. [The addition of] a long introduction (in the mode of Walt and Skeezix and other books) would have been a mistake since it would make the series seem archival rather than living kids books.

There's plenty of time to do an archival edition later: right now I think it's more important to get kids reading Stanley again as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Once there is an audience for his work, then there will be room for a more focused study of the man.

I agree with him: it's important to get these comix back into the hands of kids! Dark Horse's paperback Little Lulu books have sold well and been very much enjoyed by kids. Although Stanley's stories can be enjoyed by adults, as with Barks' work, there is much to be gained by getting this material back into the currency of young readership.

However, it is standard publishing practice to fully credit the creative talent of a book. Therefore, I strongly suggest that John Stanley be credited as ARTIST and WRITER of the comix he created fully, such as MM and Thirteen Going on 18. I hope Drawn + Quarterly will amend the credits for future JSL volumes.

As well, introductory material could be helpful in giving interested adult parents some background on what they're buying for their kids. The kids will just skip past the introduction anyway; there is an interested adult market for these books, and it seems wise, business-wise, to gear them towards as many paying markets as possible.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

UPDATE: Tom Devlin, who commented on this post, has asked that his comments be withdrawn. I found his viewpoints on the editorial vision of the John Stanley Library series of great interest. They are rather invisible in the published volumes, and given the controversy my postings have aroused, I felt that, for once, an explanation was helpful.

I'm going to paraphrase some points Tom made, just to end this dischord--a dischord not intended by me in any way...

The MM books were designed for children--as stated earlier, their goal is to bring John Stanley's comix back into circulation for younger readers. As John Stanley is one of the great American authors of the 20th century, this is a noble goal.

D+Q has tentative plans to produce an Art of John Stanley book someday. I have discussed this project with Tom, and my involvement is likely. I didn't mention it here because (a) it slipped my mind and (b) I don't like to sound off on projects that aren't in the here and now. If this book comes to be, and I am a part of it, I will be happy to work on it. I think such a book is inevitable, despite the lack of solid biographical information available on Stanley.

But Stanley is not the first great author to be written about in the absence of a great deal of biographical knowledge. The themes of his work, and the artistry of his storytelling--and his innovations to the comix format--are a rich topic, and much can be said about them.

The MM books were planned as a three-volume set, each to contain a third of the series' nine-issue run (#10 was a reprint of the first issue). This choice helped keep production costs down, and thus the retail price of the books down.

This is an elaborate book, but it's worth the retail price. As said in my review, amazon.com and other discount internet sites offer excellent deals on the book. Again, I urge you to purchase this volume to support D+Q's ambitious plans to restore John Stanley to print.

OK! Matter closed. Let's move on to new horizons. I look forward to the next volumes in D+Q's Stanley series. I may even review them here. We'll see...

Melvin Monster Vol. 1: The John Stanley Library-- a review

Drawn + Quarterly's "John Stanley Library" has begun with a handsome volume of Melvin Monster. While the book is not all it could be, it still earns my highest accolades. I felt it appropriate to review it for this blog.



This is the first time an easily-available mass market hardcover of John Stanley's cartooning has been published. (Stanley's prior hardcover appearances include a generous berth in Michael Barrier's Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics and the multi-volume, limited-run "Little Lulu Library" of the 1980s.

Within this book are the inner contents of the first three issues of Melvin Monster. This title was a part of John Stanley's renaissance as a "total" cartoonist in the 1960s.

Freed from the constraints of licensed characters, and of other, usually lesser cartoonists to complete his work, Stanley realized an elegant, distinct style of cartoon art. This style had been present in his work from his start in comic books.

By the 1960s, Stanley's sure hand and economical line were at their peak. Wielding an elegant brush-stroke, Stanley wrote, drew and lettered his work with a seeming effortlessness. As with Harvey Kurtzman and Jesse Marsh's work, Stanley's '60s comix make the artform look easy as pie.

This seeming facility belies the hard work that went into each panel. A casual look at the pages of this book reveals a masterful sense of panel composition, of narrative flow, and of the use of typography as a vital storytelling element.

Melvin Monster was John Stanley's entry in the "kooky monster" trend of the early 1960s. Alongside The Addams Family, The Munsters and a multitude of zany monster-themed trading cards, records and other ephemera, Melvin Monster was very much a product of its time--an unerringly commercial concept.

Stanley takes his time in establishing the world of Melvin Monster in these first three issues.

I don't want to burn a lot of daylight discussing the content of these stories, nor provide a sweeping canned overview of their characteristics. I'll come back to this material shortly.

From its start, Melvin Monster displays the growing darkness of John Stanley's vision. Were I a parent, I would have reservations about handing this volume to my kids without a preliminary sit-down discussion. There is intense stuff between this book's hardcovers.

The world of Melvin Monster reminds me of Lynda Barry's devastating novel, Cruddy. Both depict a universe of loosely organized chaos into which children are swept around like dead leaves.

Isolation, abandonment, entrapment, threats to life and limb (quicksand, alligators, falling objects, random acts of violence) and parental neglect are part and parcel of Melvin Monster's daily life.

Pop culture of the 1950s and '60s was quite dark in its matter-of-fact depiction of the downside of human existence. Melvin Monster is not as disturbing as the most extreme artifacts of this era.

If you want to really see something disturbing, try the Highway Safety Council-produced "educational" classroom film, The Child Molester, from 1964, or the 1960s "gore" horror-movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis, which wed Grand Guignol theatrics to the crudest lack of artistry imaginable.

Admittedly, these two examples are farther removed from the mainstream than Dell's comic books of the era. But they capture the darkest of the dark of the 1960s.

Melvin Monster comes off much lighter, in comparison, but has an inescapable, palpable bleakness.

The saving grace is John Stanley's unerring wit and Lubitsch-like comedic timing. Just when the events seem too foreboding, too grim, a comic zinger swoops down, like some benevolent bird of prey, and brightens the balance.

By this time, Stanley was comics' master of verbal patter. He, above all other contemporary comic book creators, got the rhythm of language--how to write it, how to sell it, and how to enforce its intake.

Stanley's language and verbal rhythms perform a masterful lightfooted dance throughout his 1960s work. It's abundant in Melvin Monster. It impresses me that such a dark concept can also be so frequently hilarious.

A genuine edginess distinguishes this work. Nearly half a century has not dulled this edge. If anything, these stories may be more humorous--and distubing--to 2009 readers than they were to their original audience.

About the book itself: designer Seth has done a lovely job on this book. With its foil embossing and teach-yourself-taxidermy color palette, it is also a very typical piece for the designer.

I do wish Seth would let less of his personal style into his design work. While these books--including Fantagraphics' successful hardcover reprints of Charles Schulz's Peanuts--are attractive, they often have nothing to say about the work inside, but everything to say about Seth's highly recognizable sense of graphic design.

Were John Stanley's name not on the front cover, a casual observer might think, "oh, wow; another Seth book. He sure is prolific!"

I do not criticize Seth's graphic design sense. It is well-established and easily recognizable. I think he has plenty of room to let more of the essence of the work inside shine through.

It's as if he feels a responsibility to vigorously sell the book--almost as if the work, itself, might not be strong enough to attract readership.

Upon opening the book, the reader is treated to one handsome spread after another--mood pieces that set the stage for the stories themselves. In light of my earlier comments about Seth's ubiquitous design sense, I must also state that this is the nicest-looking archival comics volume I've seen to date.

The original comics panels are isolated against a reassuring field of vintage newsprint. The effect is attractive, and makes a strong first impression.

The quality of the scans, from vintage comics, is very good. The blacks are strong and well-balanced, and fidelity to the source materials is strongly maintained.

On the flipside, some of the source materials are visibly flawed. The second issue, for example, appears to be sourced from a water-damaged, badly fluted and wrinkled original. The high-rez scanning makes every flaw in these pages vividly evident.

I found myself often distracted from the reading experience by these found eyesores. These original comics are not that rare: surely better sources can be located!

I regret that Stanley's striking cover designs for these issues are not included. Perhaps they were omitted to skirt the legal waters of Dell's possible claim to ownership of this series. Certainly the cover images themselves could be isolated and presented in these books. For one thing, they often bear John Stanley's signature--that rarest of things in his career.

For another, they are outstanding pieces of schematic design. Stanley's covers sold millions of comics--he designed the monthly Little Lulu covers. To omit this artwork and design from future volumes of the Stanley Library would be a crime.

Lastly, I am shocked at the lack of introductory material here. There is nothing that sets up these stories for the reader. It may be that D + Q want these stories to be read on their own merits, without historical context.

They work on their own, as they did in the mid-'60s. But there are remarkable aspects to this work that deserve to be stated--and which would enhance the reading experience.

I am certain that even a casual first-time reader would find the history of interest. It is a story of perseverance and artistic triumph, in a medium not inclined to reward such actions.

Just think: here is a brilliant comix creator who had over two decades' non-stop experience as a writer, artist, designer and creator--but who never signed his work before 1963, with one fluky exception.

This was the same experience Carl Barks suffered, on the other side of the continent, in his 25-year career as the "duck man" of Dell's California branch.

But Barks never developed and produced an original series idea for comix--or for any medium. He arguably rethought Donald Duck, and other Disney characters, and made them over into living, breathing, beautifully real individuals.

Barks certainly had ambitions to create his own comic strip or book from scratch, but the opportunity never happened for him.

John Stanley created at least seven original series for comic books, going back to the late 1940s.

With his all-original '60s work, Stanley reinvented himself as a newly vibrant creator. He no longer hit the ceiling of limitations imposed by licensed characters. He owned his world, from scratch, and could do as he pleased.

Decades of the daily discipline of comix writing gave his work a professional polish that helped cloak the dark themes he increasingly favored. John Stanley could sugar-coat his bitter pills of human truth just enough to get us, the reader, to swallow them.

My experience of reading his work is that its darkness and brutality often occurs to me later, in reflection. In the moment of the act of reading, his winning comedic sensibilities and brilliant narrative pacing occupy my attention.

I admire him for his ability to do two things at once: entertain and create works of emotional gravity. I think this is exactly what any modern-day alternative cartoonist strives to do with his or her work. Here is a man who managed to slip this highly personal vision between the cracks of mass-market publishing.

In closing, I urge you to purchase this book. Your purchase will encourage and support D + Q's ambitions to make a great deal of John Stanley's best work widely available. These are troubled days for book publishing. We can no longer afford the luxury of being idle spectators. This book can currently be had, for a very affordable sum, from amazon.com.

Or, better yet, buy this from your friendly neighborhood independent book store/comix store. This will encourage said seller to re-order this book, and others like it. Your purchase helps to create and sustain a market for non-crap comix in hardcover.

You will be glad this volume, and future John Stanley Library volumes, are on your bookshelf. They reward repeated readings and speak of a potential only rarely -achieved by mainstream media.