Casual Calamity Cubed: Three Stories From New Funnies 116, 1946

New Funnies was the most spontaneous and slapdash of the comics edited by Oskar Lebeck for Dell Publications. Its bar was set quite low. Quality of story and art material wavers dramatically from issue to issue.

In 1946 and '47, the title was a place for John Stanley to blow off steam, as he prepared for what he didn't yet realize was a 15-year run on Little Lulu. His story (and art) for that series is impeccable. Perhaps because the licensed property was of a higher status (and its creator was initially looking over the collective Lebeck shoulder), Stanley's Lulu is tighter, less risky and more grounded than any of his other work in comics.

While under close watch on the early Little Lulu one-shot issues (most of which you'll find elsewhere on this blog), Stanley catered to his chaotic, more off-the-cuff impulses in New Funnies. He did some of his best--and worst--work for the series.

At their finest, these stories are freewheeling, very funny and full of a street-wise charm, In their low points, they reveal their creator's burn-outs, hangovers or crunched-deadline hackwork. New Funnies was clearly not a high priority on either Dell's or Lebeck's agenda.

Offered today are Stanley's 31 pages of story for issue 116 of New Funnies, cover-dated October, 1946. I've isolated these three stories in a CBR file that you may download HERE. (If you don't like the CBR format, just rename the extension to RAR and open it with WinRar or other, similar programs).

Spoilers abound in the text that follows. Those who read the following without reading the stories themselves are living far too dangerously for their own good.

Panda, Chicken Visit Land Down Under After Passive-Aggressive Outburst; Woodpecker Plays PI, Is Fall Guy For Evil Rich: two from New Funnies 112, 1946

I'm just coming off a long, complex coloring project for another artist-writer's graphic novel. This hasn't given me much time to think about ol' Stanley Stories. In my absence, the blog continues to thrive, with a strong daily readership.

With almost 250 posts on this blog, there's already plenty to read, but here's something old, something new...

1946/7 saw the end of John Stanley's work on the New Funnies title. Having begun his 15-year association with Marge's Little Lulu by then, Stanley had also honed his storytelling and humor skills. There was still much refinement to do, as today's stories show in abundance.

Lulu changed Stanley--arguably for the better, but at a price. Certain creative and comedic tendencies, tamped down by the requirements of the Lulu-verse, would disappear entirely from his work, not to resurface until the early 1960s.

Thus, most of John Stanley's work of the 1950s is compromised in some way--despite its high quality. The energy of "Little Lulu" is strait-jacketed, when compared to his work before and after the series. It suits the characters and material beautifully, but it does not appear to have been Stanley's natural inclination as a humorist and narratist.

As the 1950s Little Lulu material is Stanley's most successful and well-loved work, it creates a wide dichotomy. Is Stanley better when he is more restrained? Or is the pell-mell, impulsive Stanley of the work outside Lulu preferable? The latter includes his remarkable run on the 1960s title Thirteen Going on Eighteen, which many regard as Stanley's finest achievement in comics.

Truly a question for the ages (for the 130 of us out there who care about such things)...

Of Mice and Mensch: Woody The Exterminator, from New Funnies 115, September 1946

One of the small rewards of Dell Comics scholarship is in spotting the myriad in-jokes and self-references in which the creators indulged themselves.

The writers and artists of Oskar Lebeck's Western Publishing staff delighted in putting one another's names--and caricatures--all over their comic-book stories.

These references, given the general lack of documentation available at present, have become the only way we have to determine who's who in the Western world.

Michael Barrier has been exploring this phenomenon in his on-going research for an upcoming book on Lebeck and his genial comics empire--a book I can't wait to read.

Woody Woodpecker, from "New Funnies" #125, 1947: Murder most fowl?

This Woody Woodpecker story, from late in Stanley's stint on Dell's New Funnies, is a curious shaggy-dog anecdote given a noir angle worthy of suspense writer Cornell Woolrich. Stanley spoofs the very 1940s notion of "murder next door"--the idea, which peaked during the horrors of WW2, that quiet, respectable people could do the most unspeakable things...and that cads, cut-throats and killers walked right beside us, every day.

Note how Woody doesn't appear until halfway through the story--and how the neighbors suspect him of being a homicidal fiend! This early post-war paranoia would usher in the tense, repressive mood of the 1950s.

This story has an outstanding occurence of in-house in-joke humor. It contains caricatures of three of the top comics artists in editor Oskar Lebeck's stable: Dan Noonan (often name-checked in Stanley's New Funnies stories), Morris "Moe" Gollub and John Stanley!

The head policeman looks much like an older version of a self-caricature Stanley drew while in high school. It also matches a caricature of Stanley Walt Kelly drew into one of his Dell-published Pogo stories.

Here's a photo of Stanley, from the 1940s:

The unshaven, fleshy, pipe-smoking cop is a caricature of Gollub; the chinless wonder with the hangdog mug is Dan Noonan.

The Dell "kiddie" comics of the 1940s are rife with in-jokes. Stanley, Walt Kelly, Gollub, Noonan, Dan Gormley and Carl Barks (who worked in California, far away from Stanley's East Coast turf) all appear in one another's stories as character names.

Another prime Stanley location appears: the cemetery. (Correction: it's a dug grave in a vacant lot--a generic setting that has strong ties to noir fiction, past and present.)

I could compile a thick volume of Stanley stories that use a cemetery as a setting. Moreso than any of his Dell comrades, Stanley had a pre-occupation with ghosts, gravestones, and other ghoulish Gothic images.

Under the protective "Dell Comics are Good Comics" umbrella, Stanley got away with a lot of hair-raising, macabre material. Many of the stories Lulu tells Alvin are grade-A horror yarns, worthy of Tales From The Crypt.

Stanley was only censored by his publisher once, when a Little Lulu story called "The Bogeyman" was deemed too nightmarish to see print. It was deep-sixed for decades, until first published in the hardcover Little Lulu Library. It's once again in print, via Dark Horse's digest-sized Lulu reprints (which were obviously shot from the hardcover volumes, as their contents are identical).

"The Bogeyman" is an extremely upsetting story. Its 1951 publication would have been a boon for the therapists of the 1980s and '90s, as deeply-scarred baby-boomers who read the story would be in need of deep-dish counselling--possibly for their entire adult lives!

Back to Dellian name-dropping... In one memorable Oswald the Rabbit one-shot of 1946, Walt Kelly uses John Stanley's name as a sound effect. How this must have puzzled tots of '46! Kelly wrote and laid out this fascinating "Four Color" issue (#102) which falls outside the scope of this blog, aside from its name-dropping salute to Mr. S.

I wish I knew who the artist of this, and other 1946/7 Woody Woodpecker stories, was. Though no Dell artist succeeded in drawing Woody as he looked in the contemporary Walter Lantz animated cartoons, this cartoonist did some compelling finishes to Stanley's layouts. I like his Thurber-esque human characters.

As a bonus, I've bookended this story with one-page gag fillers written and drawn by Stanley. These appeared on the inner covers of a few 1947 New Funnies issues. Stanley left the title by #130, but the gag filler format was continued, albeit poorly.

I'll see you in a few days with some more Stanley Stories!