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.

Something Old, Something New...

Two things of interest:

A complete collection of John Stanley's "Peterkin Pottle" stories has been posted, for free, at the Digital Comics Museum. Richard Davidson did this compilation, and it's handy to have all seven of these stories in one spot. Click on the image to go to the download page.

I have started a new blog which, like Stanley Stories, focuses on the work of one creator. In this new blog, I'll look at the Warner Brothers animated cartoons of Fred "Tex" Avery, and, I hope, trace the important developmental paths of these 60+ films--many of them landmarks in the reclamation of animation from the Disney influence. Click on the above image, or visit it at http://texaveryatwb.blogspot.com/

Farcical Frontier Genocide With Peterkin Pottle: from Raggedy Ann and Andy 33, 1949

This is the second of seven "Peterkin Pottle" stories written and drawn by John Stanley. Western Publications' editorial department had high hopes for this original creation. It knocked the titular, licensed characters off the cover of their own magazine.

Raggedy Ann and Andy was one of many Dell Comics anthologies, but it was a very different magazine pre-Pottle. RA&A was the softest of Dell's comics, filled with long text pieces, gentle moralistic material and very un-John Stanley comics.  Its editors and contributors tried to be respectable--to soothe and please post-war American tots--to a fault.

What a jolt "Peterkin Pottle" must have been to this gentle-as-a-lamb readership! John Stanley opened a personal floodgate of dark feelings and themes with this series. His depictions of childhood cruelties--and adult indifference--are unusually harsh and real.

This was the first "Pottle" story I saw, back in those dark days before the advent of .cbr and .cbz files (and their ready-for-sainthood scanners and assemblers). Pete Dillon loaned his copy of this comic to me, by mail, in 2001. I scanned it for use on the original version of the Stanley Stories website.

Despite my excitement at finally seeing "Pottle," the story left me cold. It is still my least favorite of the "Pottle" stories, despite its sharp comic timing and appealing artwork.

John Stanley's sense of absurd humor, and his regard of the world around him, generally comes from a dark place. I accept that, and generally celebrate it.

Stanley's ability to juggle with dark and light, and to find refuge in the million shades of gray between the two, is the essence of his unmistakable gift as a storyteller and cartoonist.

Darkness leaks into the Little Lulu universe. It's a major ingredient in the believability of those stories and their cast of characters. The Lulu world has gravity, and characters' actions (and reactions) have consequences. Theirs are typically comedic calamities, centered on the peer pressures and concerns of childhood.

In general, Stanley kept the darker vibe of "Peterkin Pottle" out of Little Lulu. It surfaces most tellingly in the improvised fairy tales, as told by Lulu to her next-door neighbor Alvin.

It is present in the "real world" stories of Lulu: in supporting characters such as McNabbem, the egocentric truant officer, the menacing West Side gang, and the representative of Stanley's Evil Rich, Wilbur.

Sometimes Lulu goes farther into the black. In stories such as "Hide 'n Seek," the children encounter a clearly unbalanced, unsocialized adult outsider who poses a genuine physical threat to them.

Overall, Stanley keeps the battle between bleak and bright balanced enough, in Little Lulu, to assure the series had an appealing tension. In early issues of the satellite Tubby quarterly, Stanley more indulged his dark side. Without Lulu, he was much freer to use higher narrative stakes and more imaginative themes.

Tubby is often in peril, in these early issues (most of them tellingly illustrated by Stanley), but he is a confident, pro-active protagonist. He is never consumed by the world's tribulations; he is also too self-absorbed to notice fate's more glancing blows.

In the post-Lulu series Nancy and Sluggo, Stanley created an unforgettable, unsettling adult threat to children in the character of Mr. McOnion. Sluggo's next-door neighbor, the placid but grouchy McOnion, at the flip of an inner switch (due to Sluggo's actions) becomes a tireless, talkative harbinger of doom for the impoverished kid:

These encounters are played for laughs, and are accomplished pieces of black comedy. Yet they leave a bitter taste in the reader's mouth.

This sensation is at the foundation of "Peterkin Pottle." I've written several times about this feature elsewhere on Stanley Stories. I hesitate to repeat myself further, except to note that this story pushes the limits of cruelty and violence farther than any other story in Stanley's canon until the Melvin Monster series of the mid-1960s.

Stanley's cover illustration contains a curious cut-and-paste pattern. This noticeable repetition of the Native American figures sets the mood for the remarkable story ahead.

There are brilliant moments in this second "Pottle." Stanley evokes the cliches of the frontier Western in 1940s mass media as he thoroughly skewers them. This is no specific parody of a recognizable movie or book. As with all the "Pottle" stories, the target is an entire genre.

Painted in broad strokes, the spoofing of this series might potentially be more akin to The Carol Burnett Show than to Harvey Kurtzman's Mad comics. Stanley's keenly honed wit makes these daydream sequences among the best of his writing.

That said, Peterkin's wholesale slaughter of Native Americans is a bit hard to take, 61 years after the fact. Like the frequent spanking scenes in Little Lulu, this burlesque of slaughter, though not intended to disturb, are as stark as anything in Kurtzman's E.C. war comics of the 1950s.

This story's "real world" wrap-around has a particularly bleak world-view. Peterkin is nearly narcoleptic here--unable to come downstairs for breakfast without passing out. He takes a vicious tumble down the stairs, is verbally berated twice by his harridan mother, and then sets out for school.

That's just the first page. Page two takes place on the sidewalked path to school. Here, Peterkin again hits the hay, and is mocked, made the victim of a mind-game, and coaxed into a false moment of joy--for which he is further mocked by his peers. The jeers include condemning words from his female sort-of friend, Pam:

"I think you're the silliest boy in the whole world!"

Page three finds Pottle in the classroom. His teacher, a twin for his unloving, judgmental mother, declares him to be "stup- er, slow" and sends him to the back of the seats. On his way to the shame spot, a classmate trips Peterkin and causes him further embarrassment and mockery.

Peterkin betrays no affect from the world's mistreatment. It doesn't seem to move him one way or the other. He soon drifts into a dream, in which he is admired, feared, capable and infallible. This fantasy is also full of death and slaughter.

Though it's not openly stated, it's implied that Peterkin gets his rocks off on these fantasies of murder, oppression and superiority. He engineers a smoke-signal campaign that causes a tribe of Ojibway to suspect one another of being a spy, and apparently results in a mass konking-on-head, if not something worse.

The long panel, on the top of p.8, is among the most chilling images in the history of comics. I don't think it was meant this way, but it is nonetheless.

Peterkin displays more connection to his farcical fantasy world than he does to the grim gauntlet of his daily life. He is able to do anything, and be admired by his allies and feared by his enemies. As well, he gets the girl (who is always Pam) but rebuffs her advances. Here, he does so in perfect parody of Western-movie tropes.

Just as Peterkin is felled with a stray Ojibway arrow, Miss Dumphy's ruler shatters his fugue state. Her harsh awakening returns Pottle to his awful truth. He's a disempowered schlub who will probably never do better in his life.

In the story's bittersweet finale, Pam takes pity on Peterkin and fulfills his earlier request to carry her books. Pottle refuses, in the manner of his fantasy-self. He finds the last crumb of his dignity and plods homeward, where more parental disdain awaits him.

Whew.

As said earlier, I do not shy away from the darker edges of John Stanley's world. I fully believe that this darkness gives his work a sense of literary permanence. Like any creator, Stanley made mis-steps and pursued concepts that didn't work.

"Peterkin Pottle" is the beginning of a great idea--one that anticipates Roald Dahl's writings about childhood, and a strong attempt to bring more of a sense of real life to children's comics.

Had Stanley been given another year to continue "Pottle," he might have gotten his ideas in focus--much as he did with "Little Lulu" and "Thirteen Going on Eighteen" in their first years of comic-book life. But this series was abruptly killed just at the crucial point of focus.

Like his also self-created and cartooned "Jigger and Mooch," "Peterkin Pottle" stands among Stanley's few outright failures in the comic book marketplace. (In "Jigger"'s case, it was due to the sudden cancellation of Dell's Animal Comics in early 1948.)

There is still much to learn from Stanley's failures. And although the cruelty and violence of this story may be a bitter pill to swallow, there are rewards in Stanley's approach--and in his unusual depiction of the shittiness of childhood.

This realistic decision went 100% against the "official" mainstream media vision of kid life. Even in Stanley's take on "Little Lulu," the tribulations of childhood are never overwhelming. Lulu, Tubby, and th' gang have supportive parents, teachers and friends. They are never alone. Even the ego-maniac Tubby is never truly isolated from the outside world.

Stanley's Lulu, charming and rewarding as it is, is much more in line with the mainstream reassurance that childhood is sweet and safe. There is just enough bitter mixed into the formula to give the stories lasting oomph.

I haven't yet encountered anyone who read the "Pottle" stories when they were new, but I'd imagine that they made an impact on more sensitive, less socialized children. "Pottle"s basic formula was revived in the 1960s for the American Comic Group's oddball masterpiece, Herbie. I briefly noted the similarities of "Pottle" and Popnecker HERE earlier this year.

There is one more "Peterkin Pottle" story I haven't posted here. I feel that I've said everything I can possibly say on this series (and fear that I've repeated myself too often), so let this be the last "Pottle" for Stanley Stories. At least for the time being...

Citrus Endows Pudgy Social Pariah With Unexpected Strength; Episode Proven Mere Day-Dream: "Peterkin Pottle" from Raggedy Ann and Andy 36, 1949--story and art by John Stanley

I know people love it when I post Little Lulu material here. There will be more over the summer.

But on this unusually hot July day, let's dive into John Stanley's deep, dark pool of "Peterkin Pottle." There are only seven of these stories, versus, oh, 3,000 "Little Lulu"s (that's just a guesstimate).


Here is a list of the "Peterkin Pottle" stories already posted here: #32; 34, 37 and 38.


This was Stanley's second wholly original creation for comic books. "Jigger and Mooch," which ended its six-story run with the demise of Animal Comics, at the end of 1947, was Stanley's first self-created series. With "Pottle," Stanley made greater strides towards the development of his own distinctive cartooning style. 


As I've noted before, "Pottle" is a troubling, somewhat flawed series. Its main character is almost avant garde in his un-likability. Stanley himself became aware of this, to judge by the character's changes over the seven-story course.


Pottle is an odd man out--we neither sympathize with or abhor him. He is not bright, attractive, or in any way accomplished. His status in the junior politics of playground and schoolroom is dicey at best. Other "normal" kids tease him mercilessly; teachers and adults regard him as a Special Ed candidate.


Only one other child, the girl Pam, sees anything behind his dull, impassive front. As the series develops, she becomes Peterkin's all-important Voice of Reason. In the story you're about to read, Pam comes to Peterkin's defense against a gaggle of street hooligans. This would be humiliation for most other male characters, real or fictive. To hapless Pottle, Pam is the only way out of the world's abuse, and the only life-line of hope in his world.


Peterkin chooses escapist daydreams as a way out of reality's vexations. These fantasias are usually spoofs of the tropes of popular culture. This story sort-of alludes to E. C. Segar's Popeye. More accurately, it suggests the animated version of the enigmatic seafarer, in which the consumption of spinach is a save-all for any social awkwardness or status threat. Popeye's spinach intake brings not only strength, but social skills--it may transform him into a world-class tap-dancer, or intellect, or artist.


In this story, Stanley deflates the inherent absurdity in such wish-fulfillment fantasies. Well, read it and see for yourself...

Stanley's covers for these stories are always charming and stylish. Now onto the story within...

Peterkin mutely accepts the world's hostility without complaint or reaction. Even his one friend, Pam, writes him off as a contender as she helps him home with the groceries: "You can't help it if you're weak!"

The social abuse that sparks the episode has a silver lining. The gang of kids who tease Pottle, delete items from his mother's grocery list, and then help themselves to some of the three dozen oranges they add to it, leave an emotional impression on the poor kid. Pam's comment shores up this obvious shortcoming in Pottle's being.

Small wonder that his OJ-fueled daydream would star him as a pre-pubescent (albeit pudgy) Hercules--a "perfect kid" who saves his hometown from death by flooding. Dream-Pottle is paraded in the streets as "the STRONGEST KID IN THE WORLD!"

Sadness invades this power fantasy. Pottle's score-settling with the street-kids never happens. A flood interrupts the only chance for revenge this poor soul might have. Peterkin heroically drops his grudge for the good of the townsfolk, who do laud him.

In the course of his heroic rescue, he saves Pam and her family from drowning. Peterkin notes to himself, as he swims through their submerged home, "I've never been in Pam's house before." This is a bittersweet piece of information, and leakage of his real life into his fantasy world. That even his best friend won't invite him into her home is a sad detail.

The celebration by the grateful townsfolk (and Pottle's dream) is shattered by his mother--whom Peterkin has stranded on a roof. This down-note transitions us and Pottle back into the mixed bag of reality.

The story's conclusion is heartbreaking. Pottle's mom notices the two things the rowdy kids nixed from her shopping list. She sends him back out to buy that coffee and tapioca. Although we're spared its depiction, we know that he will cross those bratty boys again, and get more emotional/social abuse. Fully awake, he realizes that he's the same sad sack he has always been, and that there is little hope for change in his social status.

This is highly sophisticated emotional material for a "kiddie comics" story. I would imagine that the readers of "Peterkin Pottle" who were anything like the character felt the pain and frustration evident in these stories. I can't imagine that sensation making faithful readers out of any of them. These stories are a mirror, reflecting the uncertainties and incapabilities of the reader ten-fold.

Peterkin does not engage in genocide in this story, thank goodness. What happens to him contributes a little bit to what has been called "the death of the heart." That deep sense of self-loss makes these stories rough going, despite their visual and verbal mastery of the comics format.

Pottle Poses As Pirate; Puzzles Parents, Peers; Performs Proudly; from Raggedy Ann and Andy 34, 1949--story and art by John Stanley

I've only posted three of these "Peterkin Pottle" stories in almost two years of this blog. I kept thinking I'd run this one already, but a search of the site shows otherwise. (To quote the sketch comedy show Little Britain, "the computer says no.")


I was reminded about Pottle from a recent re-reading of several "Herbie" stories. "Herbie" is the Green Acres of comics--a happy accident that is great despite itself, and which slung some of the most avant-garde images of the 1960s into the mass market.


"Herbie," created by Richard Hughes, staff writer of the slightly sub-standard American Comics Group, and doggedly illustrated by Odgen Whitney, is one of the most genuinely odd mainstream comic book creations. John Stanley's "Peterkin Pottle" is a precursor to "Herbie." That said, I doubt Hughes ever saw the feature during its short run of 1949.


Both features star an overweight, bespectacled outcast who isn't much liked by his peers, parents or authority figures. Unlike Herbie Popnecker, Peterkin Pottle is just an ordinary child, with nothing extraordinary except for his over-active imagination. 


When the world's cruelty is too much to bear, Peterkin retreats into broad, Munchhausen-style daydreams. As I've noted here before, his fantasies are droll parodies of pop-culture cliches. They can be quite violent, with mass murder and nightmare imagery.


Stanley never quite got the hang of "Peterkin Pottle." It was too violent and bleak for kiddie comics, and Stanley vacillated between charming and harsh humor. This, the third story in the series, falls somewhere in the middle. While Pottle is obviously the kickball of the neighborhood boys, he has some security in his friendship with the girl, Pam. She is much harsher towards him in later stories, but here she is an accepting, indulgent figure.


Pirates figure in many of Stanley's Little Lulu and Tubby stories. They are usually figures of fantasy, unlike magicians, who occupy a similarly special berth in Stanley's comic-book universe. They are threatening, uncertain figures, guaranteed to bring chaos into the mix.

Stanley's covers for this series are all winners, despite the mixed lot of the stories they support.

This is a genuinely charming and funny story; it's the best of the seven "Pottles" published. It's ingeniously presented in two acts. The first is a rowdy comedy of child-life, with attention to linguistic detail, strong dialogue and good staging of events. I particularly like the third tier of page three. Its one-two stroke of the kid's smart-ass comment, and the bewilderment of Peterkin's mother, is dead-on.

The story's second episode is the most appealing of Peterkin's daydreams. Stanley frames it sublimely; a drowsy Pottle wanders through moving traffic, sleep-walking through a vivid, lightning-fast reduction of every Warner Brothers pirate movie of the 1940s.

Peterkin is Herbie-like in this fantasy sequence. He's much more egocentric, talkative and flashy than Herbie, but he is effortlessly capable of any feat he wishes to do. Like Herbie, Pottle is recognized and admired by everyone in the story--even the alleged villains.

Although Pottle performs another mass-slaughter (as in the frontier-drama burlesque of issue 33, which I'll run here eventually), his prissy tidiness in stacking the bodies like cordwood, and then wringing blood from his sword, leavens the grimness of the moment with welcome, absurd humor.

It's interesting that Pottle imagines "Lady Pam" as his greatest sea-faring foe ("a worthy opponent"), he holds her in high regard, as in real life. Pottle's affected pirate accent would be an imitation of actor Charles Laughton, I hope.

When Peterkin comes to, roused by honking horns, revving engines and a bellicose street cop, he isn't humiliated. He regains the cool of his fantasy alter-ego at story's end. His eccentric behavior is fully supported by real-life Pam. One hopes they both have a good time at the party.

Stanley's cartooning is a bit rushed here. The vigor adds great energy to the story, but it's still sloppy work. Perhaps Stanley had to work fast, as a rule. Even his 1960s cartooning, while much tighter, often looks like it was done PDQ.

When "Peterkin Pottle" works, as in this story, it's easy to see how good the basic concept was. It's too bad Stanley wasn't given time enough to develop the series--as he was with Thirteen Going On Eighteen. The latter was the luckiest break of his career. A good idea was given enough time to become great.

Had "Pottle" succeeded, Stanley's career path would have changed, and he might not have written his greatest Little Lulu stories. As it stands, "Pottle" is part misfire, part inspiration.

Peterkin Pottle vs. Jungle Tropes: from Raggedy Ann & Andy #37, 1948

Here's another of the seven Peterkin Pottle stories John Stanley wrote and drew in 1948.

The series wasn't successful, although Western Publishing and Dell Comics gave it a fighting chance. It's the first consistent occurrence of The Stanley Darkness in Stanley's work. Darkness creeps around the edges of most of John Stanley's comix.

This original concept, about an alienated, disliked, self-absorbed junior Baron Munchhausen, is strong. Each of the seven stories has at least a moment of brilliance. Yet Peterkin is a rather cold, unlikable character.

In contrast, Tubby Tompkins, who is also a self-absorbed outsider figure, is likable. Tub has self-confidence--in ridiculous excess. He believes in himself as the center of the universe. Because he is so sure of himself, Tubby shrugs off the hostilities of the world around him. In his mind's eye, he is always right, and it's the fault of the less hep world around him that it--and its inhabitants--don't immediately get how great and right he is.

Peterkin is unconfident, diffident and isolated--the sad-sack kid everyone recalls from their grade-school experience. He's the one who sat by himself on the school bus, who ate his lunch alone, whose interactions with fellow children were usually negative and harmful.

Young Pottle's salvation is his retreat into tragicomic fantasies that reflect a distorted burlesque version of the cliched movies, adventure fiction, newspaper funnies, radio shows and, yes, comic books that were the entertainment currency of postwar American kids.

His daydreams are often disturbing: full of violence, threat, and a reflection of the indifference others show him in his waking life. Peterkin shrugs off holocausts as they occur around him.

He comes to each time, and too soon realizes he's still the same sad schlumpf, a punching-bag for his bored social superiors...a kid trapped in a life that thoroughly sucks.

The early Pottle stories are almost unbearably painful. This ties them to Stanley's later Thirteen Going On Eighteen and Melvin Monster stories. By the 1960s, Stanley had let The Darkness become his primary compass as a creator. This curious mixture of brassy, razor-sharp situation comedy and the dangerous worlds in which his figures reside can be a similarly discomfiting experience.

This dance of dark and light is the primary fascination of John Stanley's work. His strengths as a storyteller seem hard-wired into this eternal contrast of misery and joy. At his best, Stanley mingles these opposites with seeming effortlessness.

This is the next-to-last Pottle story. By this time, it would appear that Stanley realized he'd painted his creation into too dark a corner. Thus, the world around Peterkin seems somewhat softer and kinder here.

Though Peterkin is still a sitting duck for his fellow young males, the girl, Pam, is affectionate, sincere and engaging towards him. It gives us, the readers, a feeling that there may be hope for this poor inward kid after all...

Stanley's covers for the "Pottle" issues of Raggedy Ann and Andy are among his sharpest cartooning of all. Bold, decisive brush-strokes give his figures a Walt Kelly/Dan Noonan-esque quality.

As well, we get to see Peterkin colored with standard Caucasian flesh tone, rather than the fishbelly-white stylization of the inner pages. I'm not saying the color choices of the stories are wrong. They seem to be calculated to give this series an air of otherness.

This scan comes from a tattered, world-worn copy of the comic. It would appear this particular issue was much enjoyed by its readers of over half a century ago...

Here's a clearer (tho' much more high-contrast) version of the cover, from the Grand Comic-book Database's website.

And now, the story...

Although Pam's kindness to Peterkin somewhat softens this story, there is still a great deal of cruelty in this story. It's two-way cruelty. First is the torment inflicted upon Pottle by the "reg'lar fellers" with the slingshot-fired rock-to-the-tush. Pottle loses his coke-bottle specs, and interprets the blurred shapes around him as jungle animals and landscapes.

These, alas, include a late occurrence of the big-lipped stereotyped native African. While the characters are intended as parodies of jungle-movie cliches, and not informed with bias or cruelty, they are jarring.

Ditto for the festival of violence to wild animals: meant as a satire of the excesses of pop culture, but delivered with a sharper edge than expected.

Stanley's rendering of animals is among the joys of his cartooning. The hybrid of 1940s Hollywood animation style and his crabbed Thurber-esque body construction is beautiful.

This story also has an occurrence of quicksand--a favorite nightmarish stakes-raiser in John Stanley's fictive universe. Pottle's clever escape from the goo is Tubby-like in its self-assured success. Peterkin is more active and aggressive than usual in this story's fantasy sequence. 

Stanley's cartooning style of the later 1940s was in flux. I like the quality of his cartoon art, from its earliest examples to the final works of the 1960s. That said, some of his 1940s work suffers from Stanley's use of the awkward, poorly designed character styles of Marge Buell. If Stanley's early Little Lulu and Woody Woodpecker art looks ugly to some, consider the style this work was filtered through.


Peterkin Pottle and Jigg and Mooch are laudable attempts to break free of this confining cartoon style. The looseness and vibrancy of Stanley's Pottle artwork is striking. The landscapes of this story are beautifully realized, with economy of line and an impressive understanding of contour lines. This piece is among my favorite of all his comic art.

In this issue is another of Stanley's "Raggedy Ann and Andy" stories. While not as pluperfect freaky as the one I posted awhile back, it's certainly worthy of inclusion here, and will appear on this blog in good time.