Post-Mortem Post 008: New Stanley Material Discovered--Oswald the Rabbit Four Color 39, 1944

In all my years of research, I somehow overlooked this early 1944 one-shot, which is now important as containing John Stanley's first two long-form stories. This is a terrible quality scan, suitable for reading, but that's about it.

With beautiful cartooning by Lloyd White, the pun-filled main story, "Easterland," is a larval early effort, but full of Stanley tells, such as slurred language/slang, dubious authority figures, quietly absurd humor (the plight of the elderly rabbit at story's start; the out-of-control jelly bean factory and its buried inventor; the little piece of hard candy that imitates train whistles, etc.)

Stanley would include similar stories in his much-loved Little Lulu series, from 1946 on, as told by Lulu to her hellion-brat neighbor, Alvin. With this, Stanley's first fairy-tale, we see the glimmers of a street-smart, reactive retreat from the sugary tendencies of the fairy story. His humor throws a cold bucket of water on the genre, as did Tex Avery's cartoons such as Red Hot Riding Hood, Cinderella Meets Fella and A Bear's Tale.

Here is the whole issue. I will need to revise my 1940s comicography book now! I knew this would happen someday...

Easterland...

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.

New Funnies Teachings: It's A Scary World Out There!

One of the key messages in John Stanley's world is this: the world is a scary place. Funny things may happen, triumphs may be scored, losses bettered, statuses and faces saved... but one never knows what's going to happen--or why.

This element, also familiar to readers of Carl Barks' comics, gives these so-called "kiddie comics" an edge seriously lacking in much of what passes for comics, period.

This message doesn't require the walking dead, heavy artillery, secret origins or super-powers... to experience the same, the reader only needs to open his or her front door, best foot forward, and step out into the world.

Culled from two issues of Walter Lantz New Funnies (113 and 120), this special "Scary World" edition of Stanley Stories features three stories, and is available as a .CBR file >>>HERE. <<< If you're not hep to the CBR revolution, just rename the file as an .RAR extension, crack it open, and read that-a-way.

Steamy Stanley--and a bit sloppy, too: "Oswald Rabbit" from New Funnies 121, 1947

Apologies for the long absence, friends. I have been suffering from appendicitis for the last week or so. I spent four days in hospital (how I'm gonna pay for that is the $64,000 Question!), went through a lotta fever and pain, and am currently resting at home. I didn't have surgery. They elected to fill me with antibiotics and run all the bad stuff out of my system.

This seems to have worked. The antibiotics leave me queasy most of the time, and my energy level is much lower than I'd like. Things I took for granted two weeks ago now require enormous will and planning to get done.

That said, I didn't want to leave you kind folks waiting. I happened to have this story scanned and in wait for that rainy day--which is here today.

Lack of energy calls for a brief write-up today. This story is part of a small group of John Stanley post-war domestic traumas, in which the average schmo tries to attain a consumer item (suit of clothes, car, certain foodstuffs) only to find it impossible. He/she has to settle for the lousiest substitution, and attempts a cheerful facade, altho' it's painfully apparent this ersatz item is a complete failure.

Stanley did a couple of stories about the scarcity of new cars in 1947. This is unusually topical for him. As I've noted often, Stanley chose to avoid any current-events references--one reason his stories still read well today.

Stanley also wrote the "Andy Panda" and "Woody Woodpecker" stories in this issue, both of which are inspired efforts. He also wrote and drew a WW one-pager, which appeared, in one color, on the inner front cover.

This "Oswald" story smacks of "uh oh! Deadline's tomorrow!" It reflects Stanley's admitted write-as-you-go policy. No plotting, no planning--just put pencil to paper and go. This approach often gives his work a freshness and immediacy seldom found in Western's stale postwar comics. It also, as in this story, could cause narratives to peter out, despite a few moments of inspiration.

This untitled story falls squarely in that category. Stanley would quickly do a follow-up "Woody Woodpecker" story, in New Funnies #124, with the same basic set-up, but more comedic and stakes-raising oomph.

As Oswald and Toby are bland, goody-two-shoes types, they seldom have enough on the ball to carry a story. Stanley realized that the situations had to run the show. He puts some effort into Happy Mike, the used-car salesman character.

There is one transcendent moment on p.5, where a motorcycle cop stops the Squinch Steamer, formerly driven by Happy Mike, but now with a dazed Toby behind the wheel. Two panels later, Oswald also wonders how his seat got shifted around as well. This moment makes up for the general meandering of the rest of the story.

Well, that's all the commentary I have energy for today. Thanks for checking in, and may yours be good health!

Post #200: Bird, Rabbit Enter American Work-Force, Encounter Hostility, Arrogance; Woodpecker Defects From Cruelty of Streetcar Operation; Rabbit's Job Imploded

 

Here we are at post #200 for Stanley Stories. I've written some 100,000 words of chit-chat, criticism and insight in the prior 199 posts. I've also featured 303 complete stories to date.

The statistician in me wanted to know how all this fascinating data. I'll risk boring you with some factoids. I've even prepared a column chart!

[Feel free to skip this part if your personal risk of being bored is too intense. There are two 10-page stories at the end of this accountancy!]

Stanley Stories Stats:

From left to right on our primitive graph:
 

LITTLE LULU (LL) leads with 79 complete stories. I was surprised at how many Lulus were here, but, as I've run pieces from all of the 100-page giants, including several complete issues, that big number makes sense.

TUBBY comes in second place with 36 stories, followed by NANCY & SLUGGO (32), TOM & JERRY (18 stories), Stanley's horror stories (17) and ANDY PANDA (14 stories). Those are the Top 6 subjects of posting on this blog.

WOODY WOODPECKER leads the second wave with 10 stories (one which includes 18 one-pagers drawn by our hero). DUNC 'n' LOO, which I've kinda held off on, as Drawn + Quarterly will eventually publish in beautiful hardcover form, is represented with 8 stories.

HOWDY DOODY, JIGGER & MOOCH and CHRISTMAS STORIES (asst'd) are tied at 7 stories.

PETERKIN POTTLE and OSWALD RABBIT have 6 stories apiece herein.

RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY, LINDA LARK and NEW TERRYTOONS (asst'd):5 stories per.

O.G. WHIZ, LITTLE KING and KRAZY KAT have 4 stories each here.

NELLIE THE NURSE, ROOTIE KAZOOTIE, HENRY ALDRICH*, CLYDE CRASHCUP, THIRTEEN GOING ON EIGHTEEN and KOOKIE: 3 pieces apiece.

LI'L EIGHT-BALL, HECTOR THE HEN-PECKED ROOSTER and JOHNNY MOLE: 2 each.

MELVIN MONSTER, ALVIN (from LITTLE LULU), FUZZY & WUZZY*, BLACKIE THE LAMB and FLIP & DIP have each been represented by--you guessed it!--1 story.

The * means that these stories may not be Stanley's work, but they're here all the same. This goes without question for the Stan Lee-authored "Little Lizzie" stories I posted in a fit of pique sometime last year.

[END OF BORING STATISTICS]

For this special bicentenary post, we return to the first days of Stanley Stories--long before it was a blog!

Today's first story is a rescan and re-post of the very first Stanley story I ever presented, back about 2001, on the old, long-gone first incarnation of the site. This was the story that first made me aware of the work of John Stanley.

My first Stanley exposure was via a pile of mid-1940s issues of Walter Lantz New Funnies in the early 1980s. As a starving college student (hungry for both food and comics), I purchased a pile of 1945-7 issues of New Funnies from a long-gone side-street comic book and paperback shop in Tallahassee, Florida. They were cheap--a buck or two each. I didn't expect much from them. The shock-value of the "Li'l Eight Ball" stories, and the surprised reaction of friends and colleagues to them, was my initial attraction to these funny-books.

Then I sat down and read the things. I became aware that two or more creative teams supplied each issue's contents. Furthermore, all but one of them sucked. The "Andy Panda," "Woody Woodpecker" and "Oswald Rabbit" stories, especially from 1946 on, were genuinely good--funny, literate and surprising in their narrative stakes.

I wouldn't connect these stories with Stanley until a decade later, when I'd read enough of his Little Lulu work to realize these were indeed his efforts. The story you're about to read, from NF #120, was the clincher. Its black comedy, grungy urban settings and unexpected, slightly moving finale were clearly of John Stanley's hand.

Stanley's stories run in themes. A theme of his New Funnies stories is the characters' usually failed pursuit of jobs. As I scanned the story you're about to read, a quick browse of the preceding issue offered another job-failure story. (There are several such stories in the 1946 and '47 issues of New Funnies.)

Jobs and job growth are in the news these days. The general consensus is that things are getting better. I hope it's true--our economy needs all the help it can get. Perhaps the playful, perverse nature of these two stories will help things along.

In today's first feature, outsider Woody Woodpecker becomes a streetcar conductor. It's a job best suited for gleeful sadists and misanthropes. Our bird is indeed odd, but he's got a heart--a fatal flaw in this brutal business...

I don't know if Stanley lived in Manhattan in 1947. According to his son, James **, Stanley and his family lived in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. The story you've just read reveals a cynicism towards public transportation--black comedy worthy of Roald Dahl.

Woody, at story's start, is an agitated outsider, his status unsecured. This hire is a big moment in his fragmented life. Stanley plays Woody's tension for satirical humor. His words and body language parody the melodrama of every WWII Air Force movie ever made, past, present or future. In a key moment, the bird makes a naked confession to us:

The military genre parody continues on the next four pages. Woody easily passes through the red tape of signing up. He then meets his mentor, a beefy, nameless Alan Hale Jr. type with homicidal tendencies. His cognitive bias is that the passengers are potential agents of harm.

He preps the 'pecker to expect physical and emotional abuse from the streetcar riders. The opposite proves true. Nameless Mentor gets off on the physical/psychological torment of his passengers. He takes great pride in his work--note the sublime middle tier of p.8, in which he brags about the sharp timing of his enmity--and passes the torch of torture to his new charge.

Woody has reservations about this line of work; it just isn't in his makeup to be intentionally cruel to others. Here is where Stanley's hand most deeply touches this story. His Woody is the polar opposite of the brassy, aggressive animated cartoon version. He has a conscience, is humble, and considers the impact of his words and deeds on others.

In Stanley's cruel urban landscape, this brands Woody as a loser, albeit with a heart of gold. Woody is unable to zoom past stops, mangle his riders, or refuse their requests.

On the story's final page, Woody loses control of the street car, and creates a new, nicer career for himself. The silent final frame is both funny and touching. Woody has passed through--and surpassed--the careless cruelty of the world around him, and found a niche he can, indeed, scratch.

John Stanley's Working continues with an "Oswald the Rabbit" story from NF 119. Oswald is more connected to the mainstream than Woody Woodpecker. He has a home, a domestic partner, and a cheerier disposition. At story's start, he's on his way to the first day of a new occupation...

Oswald jauntily makes the best of a job others might find humiliating. His cheerful march through Stanley's mean streets, clad in a tuxedo and walking on stilts, makes him a moving target for abuse--both intentional and accidental.

Oswald remains passive; the events happen to him, and he doesn't make pains to prevent or halt them. He finds a quarter; while he retrieves it, a man lazily picks his pocket. Oswald's Tubby-like reaction to the theft bears repeating:

He arouses the ire of a beat cop, who sees Os as an agent of chaos--which he, quite unwittingly, is. Whereas Woody is more of an alienated adult, Oswald is a man-child. He follows his whims, even when they take him into awkward places.

In a vivid comedic set-piece, Oswald uses his heightened status to sneak a free peek at a ball game. A clamber of street kids scramble up his stilt-legs to partake, and Os is bludgeoned, pawed and badly shaken for his trouble.

An innocent phone call turns Oswald into a cheery fugitive. He makes a crucial mistake: he figures he'll be safest amidst the crowds of downtown. "There's a feeling of security here," he says, more to reassure himself than to inform the reader.

Oswald escapes with his life, and his sunny outlook, at story's end. It's clear that this first day on the job is also the last, but our furry hero is none the worse for the wear. Not quite a happy ending, this finale suggests that Oswald is as deluded as any other Stanley character. Even when things aren't right, and mounting evidence proves this point. his characters choose to look on the bright side.

These, like Stanley's other "working" stories, tell us that to take a job is to risk one's status (if not one's life), and to supremely test one's personal ethics and will. Anyone who's ever held a job would have to agree this is true, to some extent. I could tell you stories--anyone could as well. Most of us also have positive job stories, too, and thank goodness for that. We all want to do something that helps us prosper, but also gives us something to do that we like. Work, for many, is a necessary evil. It pays the bills, but it also takes a toll on our collective soul.

This is a silent but commonly held belief about the world of employment. Rarely is it expressed forthrightly in popular culture. Mike Judge's brilliant film, Office Space, which has echoes of Stanley's viewpoint and comedic tendencies, may be the single finest articulation of the futility of the American workplace in pop culture. It's fascinating to see this message in Stanley's work of the 1940s--at a moment in time when America was approaching one of its most prosperous, worker-friendly eras.

May your work week be unlike Woody's or Oswald's--if, indeed, you are among America's employed! See you soon with post #201...

(** PS to Jim Stanley: if you're reading this, I hope all is well with you...)

Rabbit, Bear Induce Fugue State of Time-Travel While In Antique Shop: "Oswald Rabbit" from New Funnies #123, 1947

Spoofing the ways of the past is a staple of American comedy. Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which was published in 1889, may not have been the first American work of its kind, but it established a template that has stayed with us.

In the 1930s and '40s, it was fashionable to poke fun at the Gilded Age of American life. S. J. Perelman, John Held, W. C. Fields and other major comedic voices did it with relish. Fields' movies The Old-Fashioned Way and the two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer are brilliant examples of this comedic trend.

This would be equivalent to us spoofing, say, post-war America--except that the world isn't as fundamentally different between 1946 and 2010 as it was from 1888 to 1935. Sure, we have cybernetic doo-dads out the wazoo. People beeble and booble and bleep their way through each day, aided by a battery of portable gewgaws that no one really needs, but that everyone desires to own and use.

Many of our modern marvels are just modernizations of innovations made in the early 20th century. An iPhone is still just a telephone; a PC or a Mac is essentially a typewriter with a picture tube; plasma TVs are still just television sets.

We haven't had anything as game-changing as the automobile, airplane, telephone, motion pictures, recorded sound, et al, in our lifetime. Heaven knows, I'm no expert in such matters. It would seem that the greatest strides made since, say, 1950 have been in space travel (on the big end) and health care and medicine (on the everyday level). (Thad K. reminds me to mention the Internet. I forgot the Internet. There's high-grade irony for you.)

2010 Americans would not find post-war America an alien place. With a careful choice of retro clothing and a pocketful of silver coinage and silver-standard folding money (the kind that actually states it's worth something, as seen here)...

a 2010 person could convincingly roam the streets of 1948 America (although most would be bored to tears within 90 seconds).

To humorists of the '30s and '40s, the ways of the 18th and 19th centuries were a carnival of hilarity. The elaborate dress, the florid language, the courtly behavior, the rituals of social life, and the chaste nature of romance seemed alien, cornball and insufferable.

John Stanley trafficked in this trend of fun-poking at the past and its quaintness. He chose to go back to the 18th century. This ties in with popular culture's contemporary fascination with period dramas--in which the past is taken very, very seriously.

Novels such as Kathleen Winsor's 1944 Forever Amber were huge best-sellers in wartime and post-war America. In the 1940s, Hollywood was in the midst of a decades-long love affair with Ye Olden Times. Movies as diverse as Hangover Square and Gone With the Wind painted elaborate portraits of the lifestyles of yore.

Stanley chose the costume-drama era, rather than the Gilded Age, for his comic book spoofs. Like Perelman, Fields and Held, he emphasized the excess and needless courtliness of those bygone days. Stanley makes the same point in his spoofs: isn't this just too much? Why on earth did these people go to so much fuss and bother?

In New Funnies #99, his "Woody Woodpecker" story has the bird reading a book on the subject...

Woody has a more conventional dream sequence here, as you can see. He makes a burlesque of olden manners, including the gentlemanly art of the duel. He  humiliates his duel partner--and picks his pocket for good measure.

At story's end, Woody returns to consciousness, and the present. He addresses the reader, with obvious self-satisfaction:

This untitled story is quite amusing. It's loaded with energy, wordplay and wit. John Stanley was on the start of his learning curve as a writer in 1945. Two years later, he returned to this spoof-the-Gilded-Age turf in New Funnies. This time, he adds extra layers to the scenario. As with my favorite Stanley story, "The Guest in the Ghost Hotel," this story's occurrences walk the fine line between reality and fantasy. 

Notably, this story starts with rainfall--always an agent of change in John Stanley's world.

Loaded with clever humor, farcical action, and higher stakes than the "Woody" story, this "Oswald" piece benefits from twice the page count. Stanley has time to indulge his loves of wordplay and broad physical action. He sets up an elaborate, rather intellectual gag sequence (on pp. 4-5), in which the town crier includes an oral comics section in his news broadcast.

The Thurber-esque look of the male human characters is typical of Stanley's 1946 and '47 work. I would assume Stanley was an admirer of Thurber's. I don't know if the decision to sorta-ape Thurber's cartoon style was Stanley's, or that of the unknown artists who worked on New Funnies in this period. Whatever the case, there are many occurrences of faux-Thurber in Stanley's post-war New Funnies work.

Most noteworthy in this story is the transition from 1947 reality to that of the gilded past. There is no dream sequence signifier. The antique dueling pistols bring the cuddly duo to the past; a falling chandelier literally smashes them back to present-day.

It is the characters' dialogue--and their imaginations--that put them in this timeless state. Therein, they're free to act out, 1947-style, in a world they don't understand. Oswald and Toby are somewhat informed by the knowledge of the past they've picked up from costume-drama movies and whatever pop fiction they've ingested.

Of course, their standard-issue 1940s behavior now seems a bit quaint to us in 2010. This adds another, unintended layer to the story's functions.

Carl Barks achieved something similar in his 1951 story "Donald Duck in Old California." He, too, used something more than a mere daydream to transport his characters to a very real, solid past. Barks plays things much more straight than Stanley, but he also gets some comedy from cultural incongruity--from how much things have changed in 100 years.

The way Barks brings his characters in and out of the past is far more elegant and elaborate than Stanley's devices here. Of course, Barks had over twice the page length accorded Stanley in today's offering.

If you've never read "In Old California," which is among Carl Barks' greatest achievements in comics, you can peruse it on-line HERE. These two stories allow a rare window to intensely compare the storytelling styles of Carl Barks and John Stanley.

Though I still consider Stanley the superior creator, for many reasons, I don't deny Barks' skills as a storyteller or cartoonist. They came, literally, from different places--Barks from the Pacific Northwest and Stanley from the Northeast.

The approaches of these two stories are tellingly different in that regard. Barks embraces a specific, deeply felt locale, and renders it lovingly. In "Old California," the landscape is the unspoken star of the story.

Stanley, focused on his characters, merely sketches in a broad background and lets it function as a backdrop to the action. Historical accuracy is obviously not a concern of his. He gives the reader just enough to coast on, and lets his characters and their motivations run the show.

With this final thought, I'll seal the cork on today's missive, and toss it upon the vast waters of the Internet...