"Tom and Jerry" from Our Gang Comics 11: Ghosts and Seamen Never Mix

The picking have become decidedly slim here, and posts fewer and farther-between. In scraping around for un-posted odds and ends, I hit on this six-page story from 1944.

One of the few "Tom and Jerry" stories not already featured here, it's written and drawn by Stanley, who also did his highly distinctive lettering.

Throughout John Stanley's comics career, he did good stories and bad ones. In the latter, he either wasn't having a good day, was racing against the deadline clock, or just didn't care.

More of these stories exist than we'd like to believe. They are part and parcel of the commercial comics business.

Mainstream print is slapdash and panicky by its very nature. Ultimately, what matters most is that something is on every page of a newspaper, magazine or book. That content doesn't have to be good. It just has to be.

"Hey, Can I Yell Now?" "Andy Panda" from New Funnies 84, 1944--story and some art by John Stanley

Thanks to Michael Barrier for his kind scanning of the three remaining issues of New Funnies I didn't have in my John Stanley archives. From the earliest of these issues, NF 84 (cover-dated April, 1944) comes this energetic, faintly anarchic and charming "Andy Panda" story.

Today marks my 49th birthday--and the only day of my life that I'll be 49 on 4/9. With Barrier's kind consent, I share this very rare story as a birthday present to John Stanley admirers everywhere.

It's noteworthy as the first John Stanley comics story with an overtly supernatural theme. As mentioned in my previous post, Stanley had an evident fascination with horror/supernatural themes. I don't know if he thought the supernatural was hogwash or not. He often debunks its apparent presence as a narrative twist. He also often treats such themes with considerable respect.

They are a rich part of the fabric of the numerous fairy tales told by Lulu to Alvin in issue after issue of Little Lulu. His infamous pair of early 1960s horror comics, Ghost Stories #1 and the one-shot Tales From the Tomb, take an unusual spin on such themes, but still treat them with reverence.

In his first year as a comics creator, Stanley worked more cautiously, and focused on comedy and character relationships. Genres and themes were just window-dressing, to give the stories variety. It wasn't until the untitled story in his first Oswald Rabbit one-shot, published one year later, that Stanley made his first bold step into the outright inexplicable and supernatural.

That story, posted here in 2008, is also among his only unbridled screwball stories. Dig around in this blog's back pages and you'll find it.

And now, here's the story...

Stanley handles the spook elements uncertainly in this early effort. Before the 1944 "Scooby Doo" twist is revealed, the spirits are, indeed, spirited, and prove intense, unpredictable foils for panda and chicken.

That said, among the fake ghosts are one of his first Tubby-esque characters. Robert, the apparent midget of the haunted house crew, is obsessed with yelling. This post's title quotes from the delightful moment on p.6, panel 2, where Robert requests permission to yell in the midst of a seemingly impossible physical event.

Stanley drops the first name of his friend and Western Publishing colleague Walt Kelly on the last panel of p.6. Ghost Walt, who smokes a tell-tale cigar, wears a stovepipe hat, in an apparent nod to the likes of Bill Holman's screwball comic strip Smokey Stover.

Stanley lettered this story, and I believe those are his pencils, with another's inking. The ink lines are thicker (but not slicker) than Stanley's other 1944-5 work. For a particulary gorgeous example of Stanley's ink line, see the "Woody Woodpecker" stories from New Funnies 92 and 93. (Yep, you guessed it... they're also posted elsewhere on this blog.)

Stanley's first masterpieces were a year away, but his 1944 stories show a remarkably quick development as a comic book creator. He grokked the form almost immediately, and added his own touches to the comics lexicon, as both cartoonist and storyteller.

For dessert, here's the cover--again penciled by Stanley and inked by someone else on the Western Publications staff.

Halloween Hoo-Hah: "The Spook Tree," from Little Lulu 34, 1951

Apologies for the lack of postings here lately. In part, it's because I'm busy promoting one graphic novel and, with my friend and collaborator David Lasky, trying to finish the other, much bigger one.
As well, it's getting harder to find new material of interest, without resorting to the obvious. But resort I shall, today.

I'm sure many Stanley Stories followers have a modicum of patience for the more obscure material I present here. What the people want is more Little Lulu. Although her complete works have been reprinted, Lulu's pre-1955 stories have yet to be presented in accurate color versions. Like Harvey Kurtzman's self-drawn stories for EC Comics, Stanley and Irving Tripp's Lulu needs color to be complete.

I was recently gifted with super-hi-rez scans of "The Spook Tree," which is among the best of John Stanley's many stories with supernatural themes. Since it's Halloween and all (and since I've exhausted the available stores of horror-themed Stanley comix), it's time to put this one on display.

To read this story in color--even crappy high-speed press Dell Comics color--is preferable to seeing it in brutal black and white.

"The Spook Tree" is the rare Stanley supernatural piece that doesn't try to blur the boundaries of consciousness. Unlike "The Guest in the Ghost Hotel" or the untitled "Li'l Eight Ball" story from New Funnies #101, "Spook Tree" is, like one of Lulu's on-the-fly fairy tales, framed and contained.

Lulu's dream reflects her own social biases--that Tubby thinks only of himself, and that he patronizes Lulu, whom he thinks "hasn't got any sense." It includes a great deal of personal anguish. Twice, Lulu emits the wail of the lost and disconnected in John Stanley's world:

BAW! is the anti-YOW! These three-letter words convey the polarity of experiences in John Stanley's world. YOW can connote joy, anger, fear, surprise, irony, and other emotions. BAW is the banshee call when all is lost.

Both words were an established part of comics' vocabulary before Stanley used them. In his stories--particularly the Little Lulu pieces of the 1950s--these two simple words are the ultimate signifiers of his characters' well-being (or lack of same).

Stanley's most affecting use of BAW is in that "Li'l Eight-Ball" story from 1945:

As I commented in 2009, this is one of the most forlorn tiers in comic-book history. In the context of the story, it imbues the stereotyped Eight-Ball with raw, real feelings of sorrow. Due to the racial stereotyping, it's an awkward moment, viewed in a 21st-century perspective. But intense vibes of sadness come from these two panels.

The coloring of "The Spook Tree" is as harsh and flat as Lulu's self-fulfilling dream-fate. Earlier issues of LL with night scenes chose a softer, more atmospheric palette, as in this excerpt from issue #26:

The starker affect of the colors in "Spook Tree," whether intentional or not, support the jarring, edgy turns of the narrative.

Page Four uses a linear technique unique to this story. In panels three to six, radial black lines, with a yellow undercoat on plain pulp paper suggest the disorienting harshness of a street lamp on a dark night. The lines, connected to a sun-like disc of yellow, have a condemning quality.

As with most of her made-up fables, this fantasia seems self-punishing. In her waking state, Lulu is a sort-of authority figure. She accepts a great deal of responsibility, and enforces a kind of playground jurisdiction with her friends. She is called on to keep Tubby and Alvin in line (often by their parents) and speaks up when she sees them misbehave.

With the aid of her friend Annie, she often thwarts Tubby's elaborate schemes. In landmark stories such as "Five Little Babies" (LL #38), she subjects Tub and his clubhouse pals to epic public humiliation. Perhaps her role as victim, cast-out and put-upon, in her self-spun stories, are her tacit way of balancing her wheel of kiddie karma.


Little Lulu, though rooted in a recognizable, workaday reality, often excurses into the supernatural. Many of these instances occur in Lulu's improvised stories, or in her dreams (see "The Throw Rug", in issue #64, for another striking variant of this theme). "Haunted houses" recur in both dream and non-dream stories, with the children's imagination (and willingness to be scared) the crux of most instances.

Just beneath the benign surface of Little Lulu is the message that the world is a potentially frightening, harmful place. This notion, because it is real, carries more weight than the ghosts, goblins or spooks of Stanley's harmless fantasy sequences. This sense informs all of Stanley's work, and becomes more pronounced--and almost unbearable--in his Nancy and Melvin Monster stories.

In Little Lulu, this sense of unease, seldom stated outright, governs the stories, and gives them a gravity unlike any other mainstream American comic books. It's so deeply woven into the stories' fabric that it often flies below our radar. To notice this sense of unease is to read Little Lulu in an entirely new way.

The balance of light and dark is pitch-perfect in the Lulu stories of 1950-1955. It's easy to take these stories for granted. They lack flaws, and never rustle the reader's suspension of disbelief. By peeking under their entertaining surface, we see how complex these stories really are--and why they remain as potent in 2011 as they were in 1951--the year "The Spook Tree" was first published.

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SPECIAL THANKS to Thomas H. Buchanan, who tipped me off on how to disable Blogger's lightbox display. Now you can view the pages of each story without that annoying hassle. If you have a blog on this system, and are bugged by the lightbox, here's all you need to do.

In Dashboard mode, choose the 'Settings' tab. Then choose the 'Formatting' sub-tab. On the list of options in Formatting, change the lightbox setting to 'no'.

Parachutes, Poltergeists and Pigeons: Three Stories from Little Lulu one-shot #115, 1946

Have crowd, will please! Though I've just about exhausted the other John Stanley stuff, I still have the early Little Lulus to fall back on. I have bypassed these stories for a few years, as I've dug around in Dell/Western comics history, in search of unexplored Stanley stories.

My admiration for these stories is high. They represent an early plateau in John Stanley's comics career. After two years of sometimes-inspired knockabout comedies for the likes of New Funnies, Animal Comics and Our Gang Comics, Stanley had emerged a solid comedic writer and cartoonist, with a strong command of character, narrative stakes and dialogue.

Marge's Little Lulu was a prestige project--its source was not Hollywood animated cartoons. Low though Marge's comedy may have been, its publication in a national slick magazine gave it higher status than the likes of Andy Panda and Johnny Mole.

Not to knock those 1943-45 efforts! Stanley quickly proved himself the funniest creator on Western Publications' payroll. Carl Barks, on the West Coast, had yet to hone his comedic sense to the heights he would reach at the end of the decade. Walt Kelly and Stanley ran neck-and-neck as celebrators of comedic chaos.

Kelly can be devastatingly funny in these early comic book works. His more leisurely, wordy pace sometimes drowns his '40s comics in an excess of detail. Kelly would peak as a writer alongside Stanley, although in the higher-status world of syndicated newspaper comics.

John Stanley becomes an expansive, thoughtful writer via Little Lulu. Though the series quieted his more antic side, he gained much in terms of character development, escalating narrative stakes and the eternal balance of light and dark.

Missing from the mix is his hand as cartoonist. As of this issue, Stanley surrendered the finished artwork to the team of Charles Hedinger and Irving Tripp. This switch upset character creator Marge Buell, and is a visual low point in the series. Lulu wouldn't look right again until late 1949, when Irv Tripp and others had more or less perfected the look-and-feel of the feature.

Stanley had free rein to vary his story lengths in these Little Lulu one-shots. Though he had written several long narratives for earlier "Four Color" one-offs, many of those stories seem breathless and over-stuffed when compared to his Lulu work. In his short stories for the anthology titles, which had a strictly regimented page count, Stanley the improviser sometimes wrote himself out before a story was over.

Lulu gave him the privilege to make page count serve narrative. If a story needed to be 24 pages, or four, that was fine. This was exactly what he needed to grow as a writer.

In the three selections from this 52-page magazine, we have stories of 16, 5 and 10 pages' length. The stories move at the speed required by their situations.

Early occurrences of classic Stanley themes appear in these stories. In the first, and longest, piece, "Fights Back With a Club," Stanley expands upon the gender-war of the previous issue's "He Can't Hurt Us." Added, this time, is the further stakes-raiser of cross-dressing. This introduces a whole new world of humiliation for the eternally proud, stubborn Tubby Tompkins... and brings peace to a war-torn world.

From trouser loss to unconvincing drag, Tubby fights in vain for his masculine dignity. That is, until he discovers that he kinda likes knitting doilies.

This is the first of many instances of cross-dressing by Tubby. A means to an end, this socially awkward action never really bore fruit for the self-deluded Tompkins. Did this stop him from donning dresses and ratty wigs? You already know the answer...

This cheerful act of vulnerability puts a kibosh on the boys v. girls business. In the unusual half-page panel that closes the story, males and females are joined together in productive harmony. While it's an amusing finale, the kids' comfort level in their united efforts is a smart, satisfying wrap-up to a story that bounces all over the comic/narrative map.

The anonymous child's closing comment, "I hope this here thing is washable!," anticipates the attitudes of Charles Schulz's early Peanuts characters. It's no stretch to imagine c.1952 Charlie Brown uttering this concern.

Today's second feature, "Brings Some Friends Home to Dinner," is a follow-up to the prior issue's "Stuff an' Nonsense," with its theme of animals that bring chaos to Lulu's barely-civilized life--and impact the status quo of her long-suffering parents.

The pigeons are antic aggressors in this short story, and they quickly become a threatening (and possibly permanent) element in Lulu's world. The story ends without resolution--a Stanley touch that would become sublimely refined by the 1950s. While it's not exactly The Birds, the avian threat in "Brings Some Friends..." is a mite unsettling.

Our last piece today, "The Haunted House," introduces a major Stanley theme: the supernatural. Stanley dabbled in the genre in a 1945 "Oswald the Rabbit" story, but it is more fairy-tale than spook-show. Here, John Stanley introduces supernatural elements into everyday settings. It's open to interpretation, as in his masterpiece, "The Guest in the Ghost Hotel," in that the ghostly goings-on may, or may not, just be products of over-active child imagination.

Equally important, in "The Haunted House," is the presence of a threatening, physically aggressive adult figure. Kebel is the first of many such figures in the world of John Stanley. Typically, Kebel's entrance is heralded by a fearful discussion of the threat he poses:

While Kebel is just a bad-tempered loud-mouth, his hostile personality is clearly a long-standing thorn in the ephemeral sides of Timmy and Gertie, child-ghosts who mirror Lulu and Tubby in girth and interests. Tubby is comfortable in Timmy's presence, and babbles banalities, including the sublime statement "I play third base good." Lulu and Gertie also find immediate points of connection.

Does any of this really happen, or is it just imaginative wish-fulfillment for Lulu and Tubby? Regardless, a-hole Kebel soon appears to disrupt this peaceful meeting. Unlike the flesh-and-blood "Ol' Mister Grump" of the terrifying "Tubby" story "Hide And Seek" (Little Lulu 79), Kebel shows no signs of being physically abusive. As the kid-ghosts are able to neatly hang up Lulu's and Tubby's hats on a hat-rack, it's possible that the older Kebel is capable of causing harm to our two human protagonists.

Kebel never gets a chance to warm up. Lulu is able to out-shriek him and drive him out of "Carson's ol' house"--perhaps for good. The story's open ending invites a sequel that never quite happened, although the Lulu cast would continue to haunt haunted houses for the rest of Stanley's tenure.

"The Haunted House"'s first page is beautifully written. As the kids approach the Carson house, Tubby proudly traces his personal growth, via the height of its windows that he has broken. This says much about Tubby's personality--and offers us this information without awkward exposition.

The story's final frame offers a lovely early example of a Stanley off-beat finale. Any other author would have been satisfied with the soothing farewell uttered by Lulu. Not Stanley; he focuses on Tubby, already lost in his personal myopia.

These Little Lulu one-shots were obviously a success. Three issues were published in six months' time, and within 10 successive numbers of this peculiar try-out series.

It may not have yet been clear to John Stanley, in 1946, that Lulu would soon eclipse all his other comic book work. With each issue outdoing its predecessor in narrative and comedic flair, the popular success of Stanley's Little Lulu was a rewarding response.