The Tao of Yow: John Stanley's World: new book available on amazon.com

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book on John Stanley.

The Tao of Yow includes revised versions of three of the acclaimed "John Stanley's World" essays from this blog,  alongside four new pieces. All are profusely illustrated in full color with images from printed comics, production materials and rare promotional items that have sat, unseen, for over half a century.

This 154-page, 8 x 10" softcover, professionally bound and printed through the Createspace print-on-demand program, is designed as a companion to my three-volume bibliography of John Stanley's work in comics. Since those books are mostly data, they left little room for the type of material in The Tao of Yow. Given the impermanence of the Web, in which a long-established site or blog can vanish overnight, it seemed like a good idea to commit some of these pieces to the printed page.

Here is the book's table of contents:

The essay on p. 122 offers a first-time-ever full color version of a certain notorious "Little Lulu" story from 1950:

The Tao of Yow: John Stanley's World may be purchased on Amazon at this link. This will, I hope, be the first in a series of books that collect, expand and revise my work on this long-running blog.

Dog Daze: the last of Jigg and Mooch

A combination of too little sleep, too much snow, and too hectic a schedule has rechristened my cold. I'm feelin' sick as a dog, so it's only fair that I post two Stanley stories about our canine companions, Jigger (now "Jigg") and Mooch.

These are the final stories in the feature's short run, from Animal Comics 29 and 30. I've now posted the full run of this remarkable strip.

Stanley signs these stories as "Biff." Here is his cartooning at its most austere. The clean, mechanical pen lines suggest Herge, or the ink and paint department of a Hollywood animation shop.

Jigg's language is spare. Punctuation is only used when absolutely necessary. Part of the language of comix is the avoidance of periods to end sentences and statements. Periods were avoided because printers mistook them for flaws and removed them, or else they failed to survive to the photostat/engraving stage. (The same thing often happened to Charlie Brown's eyes in the early days of Peanuts.)

! replaced . in the comix vocabulary! Thus, most early comix dialogue seems quite loud! Even the simplest statement is fired off with an aggressive exclamation mark!

Stanley chooses to end his sentences like this This makes for a curious reading experience Thank goodness for the enclosure of the balloon Otherwise, one would never be quite sure where one statement ended, and the next began

In the 1950s, Stanley got heavily into his ellipse period. This...could punctuate a sentence...in a number of ways...creating interesting...rhythms...

But enough of this! I hate to get bogged down in semantics Let's just...move on...shall we...

I feel rather written out on Jigger/Jigg and Mooch. I admire how Stanley kept his storytelling clean and direct. It's so nice to see an author write TO children, not DOWN to children. I think he best achieved this effect with this feature.

"Jigg" has an child's sense of urgency that is at the heart of the Stanley worldview: survive, move forward, stop and take stock of the world around you. A child can relate to this more than an adult, I think. The child in me still relates to it, very strongly...

From Animal Comics 29... a classic "mind-fudge" scenario:








The final story, from Animal Comics 30:

Two jiggers of "Jigger": Animal Comics 25 & 27

There are four Jigger and Mooch stories left to post. Here are two of them.

The first, from Animal Comics 25, shows the characters' startling makeover from their prior, debut episode. Drawn as scruffy, mangy mutts for their first appearance, they were radically redesigned as high-style, "cartoon modern" critters for the rest of their brief run.

John Stanley drew the remaining six stories in this series. This is some of his finest cartooning. It is so stylish and so designed that it looks European rather than American.

I like the modeled color on this episode. I imagine it was hard to pull such effects off in the poorly-printed medium of 1940s funnybooks. It is a rare treat to find a copy of a comic from this decade in which all the colors are correctly aligned. One gets used to the red plate being horribly out of register, or the blue pitifully under-inked.

The reckless printing methods tend to become part of the vocabulary of comix. I appreciate the efforts of the brave souls who sought to do ambitious coloring, as in this story.

This 3-D approach was quickly dropped. Very likely, it was discarded the day that copies of this comic arrived from the printer. After a few in-office "YOW!"s, flat color was assigned to our canine contendahs. (Jigger, being white, was allowed to keep some blue shading.)

Here's the story from ANIMAL #25...









This next story, from ANIMAL #27, is, at eight pages, the longest of the seven Jigger stories. It is also perhaps the bleakest and most grotesque. Stanley is almost the Eugene Ionesco of comix. Absurdity, futility and despair are tightly woven into the fragile fabric of his narratives.

Mooch is so hungry his ribs are showing. Jigger suggests that they try hunting for live game. This stirs up some "Tubby Talk" in Mooch, who precariously clings to what little pride this ragamuffin life allows him.

This hunt quickly devolves into a festival of humiliation for the poor dog. But food--albeit of a dreadful variety--finally comes his way.

It is beautiful cartooning. I like the angularity of the angry cat, and of the water splashes. Those, in particular, would fit into a Lionel Feininger comix page. I'm curious to know if Stanley studied the work of Euro-cartoonists. He appears to be attempting some of those non-American effects throughout this series. This tendency does not show up in any of his other written-and-drawn jobs (that I know of).

This story is as bleak as any of John Stanley's 1960s material. This is an aspect of Stanley's work that must be accepted, without hesitation. Despair was the conduit of his storytelling genius.

Stanley is unremittingly bleak. His most popular series, LITTLE LULU, somehow manages to temper this bleakness, and make it appealing and apt.

In this series, as with PETERKIN POTTLE, Stanley let his existential dread run the show. To me, stories such as this completely defy the whole idea of "children's comics."

I'm glad that Stanley was allowed to put such simon-pure depictions of desolation, hopelessness and absurdity in mass-consumption work. I can only wonder what message 1940s kids got from these stories.

Stanley was a harbinger of the bleakness of the Cold War era in America. Perhaps stories such as these helped prepare young people for the years of fear and uncertainty that lay ahead of them.

That same bleakness keeps these stories vividly alive, decades later.

Jigger, Mooch and "food that don't fight back:" from "Animal Comics" #28, 1948

By popular demand...here's another of the handful of "Jigger" stories that John Stanley wrote and drew for Animal Comics.

Typically for this series (and 1940s Stanley), we have a pair of dispossessed figures who leave their familiar world for unknown places. In this case, these two city dogs elect to head for the sticks, in search of food that little Jigger swears "jus' lays around on the ground!"

Stanley has these two canine characters' personas down by this story. Jigger is a typical Stanley protagonist. He's driven to see his plans succeed, even when life has shown him that they typically don't pan out. Mooch is content to lie on a dirty sidewalk, and takes much prodding and convincing by his tiny pal to even get to his feet.

Mooch remains unwooed by the charms of the wide-open spaces, where even the apples seem to have it out for him.

The settings are familiar Stanley territory. This run-down, utilitarian urban landscape--one that looks distinctly Northeastern--is the stage for hundreds of John Stanley's stories. Most of Little Lulu and Tubby take place in this anonymous Anywhere, USA.

Wish I had more to say about this story. I kinda shot my wad on "Jigger" in the previous post on this series. I love Stanley's highly stylized, tight cartooning on this series. His artwork never looked the same anywhere else.

Hope you enjoy this story, and thanks for dropping by! I'll do another post tomorrow...probably some more stories from Dunc 'n' Loo!

Jigger's search for food: from "Animal Comics" #24 and #26

"Jigger" was John Stanley's first original creation for comic books. Prior to this strip, Stanley had drawn some "Little Lulu" and "Woody Woodpecker" stories. This feature lasted for seven installments. With the sudden demise of Animal Comics in 1948, "Jigger" vanished.

Jigger and Mooch are two city dogs. They're homeless, and, in the tradition of John Stanley's marginal, outsider characters, they're driven by needs.

The dogs like to eat; they always need food. They value their freedom; thus they need to avoid the dog catcher. They like a peaceful life; they need to escape bullying alpha-dogs.

These two stories show the severe visual metamorphosis of this Stanley strip. It ran in the high-quality Dell anthology Animal Comics. Under the flimsy roof of its slick-paper covers, a 1946 kid could find strong work by Walt Kelly, Dan Noonan, Oskar Lebeck and other Dell staffers of note.

Stories in this title vacillate from sedate story-book outings to sinister life-or-death scenarios. "Jigger" attempts to straddle the Animal Comics extremes.

Their grave struggles are portrayed with laconic gentleness. This off-beat approach is common in Stanley's 1944-46 efforts.

As with Stanley's best work, "Jigger" celebrates the eccentricity of its characters. The dogs' naivete, as they explore a puzzling human world, is similar to the experience of the mice in Stanley's earlier Tom and Jerry feature for Our Gang comics.

Notice how different the drawing and character design is in these two stories. The first story (if indeed fully finished by Stanley's hand) is quite primitive-looking. The drawing has some charm, but is several notches below the stunning work turned out by Kelly and Noonan.

In the third story (the second one here), Stanley has jiggered "Jigger." The characters are now ultra-stylized. Mooch is unrecognizable from his first appearance.

The pillow-like contours of the characters, drawn in thin, hard pen lines, are strikingly achieved. It is among the tightest rendering of Stanley's career. He would abandon this "clear line" style after "Jigger."

Stanley settled on the odd pen-name of "Biff" for this feature. What that means, I dunno. Stanley's touch is evident in the drawings of people, and in Jigger's simple, appealing design.

The setting is even more familiar--the urban Everywhere that also plays home to the Lantz and Lulu characters. It's not as cramped as the tenement settings of the later Dunc 'n' Loo strip, but it's not Suburbia, either.

The first story has one of Stanley's funniest comic-book sound effects--the CHISH and CHURFs of Mooch's successful digestion of a rubber dog toy. I doubt these unique SFX made a second appearance in the Stanley universe.

For your reading pleasure, here are the first and third episodes of "Jigger." Enjoy these stark but charming stories!