Post-Mortem Post 005: The Second Nancy and Sluggo Summer Camp Special

Every so often, I get an e-mail from someone who has read and enjoyed this blog during its heyday. Though I consider Stanley Stories a done deal, I have done an occasional "post-mortem post."

These include material I've recently discovered, or oversights that really ought to be added, the better to make this site an exhaustive reference of the work of John Stanley.

Longtime reader B. Baker wrote recently, and requested that this second and last Nancy and Sluggo summer camp special be posted. It's still summer, so the time seems right.

I've written much about Stanley's Nancy comics elsewhere on this blog. As well, the 1950s and 1960s volumes of my illustrated Stanley comicography (available HERE and HERE on amazon.com) offer basic information on Stanley's creative involvement in this series.

This second 84-page graphic novelette is the lesser of the two Nancy annuals. The 1960 annual is one of Stanley's most satisfying, cohesive longer works. It's arguably the finest of his Nancy run--tense, edgy and amusing, with constant status shifts.

Stanley sleepwalks through much of Nancy, with refreshing pauses when newly-created secondary characters pique his interest. The series' humor is hard-edged and not always appealing. Character relationships are often brutal and loveless. Nancy and her Aunt Fritzi, for example, appear to barely tolerate each other's presence. Their existence together seems the result of an unspoken, half-hearted truce.

Ernie Bushmiller's original template is also troublesome, in this regard. In the Bushmiller world, events occur in one-gag increments. Fritzi's impatience with Nancy was a constant source of quick-laff set-ups. Perhaps Stanley chose to follow that, no questions asked, as it was one of the popular comic strip's backbones. That we see longer sequences, in which Nancy and Fritzi bicker, taunt and belittle each other, brings the laffs to a screeching halt. In these moments, Nancy threatens to become Edward Albee's Comics and Stories.

Sluggo is the character that most sparks Stanley the writer. As a student of social status, with a soft spot for life's underdogs, Sluggo seems to speak to Stanley. He is the lowest of his many low-status figures. He is not self-absorbed or full of hot air, like Little Lulu's Tubby. Nor is he zany and free-wheeling, as in Stanley's version of Woody Woodpecker.

Sluggo seems numbed, resigned to his fate and unable to change anything in his life. He is befriended by Nancy, and other kids, but shares none of their daily comforts. He is, on one hand, a child's fantasy of independence. No parental figures overshadow Sluggo. His next-door neighbors, the McOnions, are negative-image parents. They take some interest in Sluggo's well-being, but any benevolence is shattered by husband Bunion "Bunny" McOnion's schizophrenic mood-swings.

Freedom's price-tag is that Sluggo lives a life of flux. Nothing is certain, nothing stays the same for long, and his well-being/sense of self is in a perpetual state of challenge. It's a good life if you don't weaken!

Mr. McOnion is the most constant figure of threat and doom in Sluggo's life. In the first Nancy annual, Stanley makes his most memorable use of this twisted relationship. The re-match seems redundant here, but its less terrifying turnout suggests that someone might have mentioned to Stanley that he overdid the darkness in that first annual.

Whatever the case, this is still an amusing, if spotty, comic book. Good moments outweigh the bad, and as with the first annual, there seems a spark of life and interest in its contents. Here's the entire book, minus activity pages. Enjoy...

Whistling in the Graveyard: "Woody Woodpecker," from New Funnies 118, 1947

Here's a so-so "Woody Woodpecker" story, from John Stanley's most active period on the New Funnies title.

Before we begin, I'd like to share with you an image from the back cover of this 1947 funnybook. '47 subscribers to New Funnies received a sub-standard picture of Andy Panda, suitable for framing, and 100 of these delightfully casual lickem-stickem labels:

I love how the characters just stand there, doing nothing. Their gaze suggests that they're watching a fascinating event that we don't get to see. Nowadays, they'd have to engage in visual multi-tasking--throwing a Frisbee while texting, or eating a hot dog while skateboarding. (And, of course, Li'l Eight Ball, and his disproportionally freakish feet, would be literally out of the picture...)

That diversion (and catchy image to attract new readers) out of the way, here's today's story. There are my scans.  Because I didn't have access to Photoshop, I had to leave 'em their amber tone of ancient newsprint. If nothing else,these scans offer a solid replica of reading the actual funnybook.

This untitled story has a schizophrenic structure. It begins as a domestic comedy of frustrations, and ends as a spook-show, populated with typical Stanley graveyard-humor tells. Woody acts Tubbishly throughout. No one would choose this as an example of John Stanley's best work. But even his detritus has some value. Read 'n' see...

This story shows the merits and flaws of Stanley's spontaneous story-telling. I'm sure that he had no idea the story would shift locales from apartment building to graveyard as he started writing and sketching.

That improvised approach lends a giddy air to the events, tho' they lack the more solid base of a carefully plotted narrative. But a more tightly planned story might not have the remarkable ending of this piece. Indeed, those last two panels save this story. They reinforce the random-Dada aspect of Stanley's Woodpecker. He is a creature of impulse, coasting from whim to whim, not much caring where these abrupt decisions take him.

Stanley was fond of the comically portentous figures seen in this story from p.4 on. The bearded character turns up in several of his 1944-47 stories. They remind me of R. Taylor's 1920s Canadian comic-strip, The Mystery Men, which I doubt John Stanley ever saw:

Taylor later became a successful cartoonist for The New Yorker and Playboy. Stanley briefly cracked the New Yorker market, but apparently abandoned it (file under "Research, Further"). Taylor's creepy saucer-plate eyed characters were popular enough to be compiled in hardcover in the 1940s.

The cartooning in this 1947 story is fluent and pleasing. The artist (Dan Gormley, I guess) took pains to make Woody look more like his on-screen version. It's graceful, appealing cartoon art, in which Stanley's hand is less evident that usual.

Stanley returned to the graveyard locale many times in his classic run of Little Lulu and Tubby stories. Stanley's graveyards all look alike, with those cliff-like raised plots and rounded purple-grey tombstones. Background elements are as much as Stanley "tell" as the chompfs and yows.

Next time, you'll see one of Stanley's longest stories, and how it ties into a contemporary art exhibit! Check back on May 21st for the full story...

Nancy and Sluggo Summer Camp special, 1960, Pt. 1: Serial Stalking, Addled Adults and Confused Kids

I've held off on using much material from John Stanley's Nancy and Sluggo comics, in deference to Drawn + Quarterly's ongoing series. It'll likely be awhile before they reprint the two summer camp specials of 1960 and 1961.

Thus, given the drying up of usable non-Little Lulu material I have, necessity commands that I mete out this 80-page giant for your reading and perusing pleasure.

This special comic book served as a gateway for the release of some of John Stanley's inner darkness. Said darkness bubbles up in the latter run of Little Lulu (the story "Hide and Seek," featured elsewhere on this blog, is a potent example).

The careful contrast of dark and light is the cornerstone of John Stanley's vision. At the end of the 1950s, the dark began to overwhelm the lighter aspects of his work. It seems inevitable that comic book creators' bitterness leaked into their work, as the years piled up. It happened to Jack Cole and Carl Barks, two other major creative forces of the American comic book. Their later work impresses--and depresses--with its glum, dimmed tone.

In Barks' case, it seemed to be 60-something crankiness. His 1960s stories cast an increasingly jaundiced, cynical eye on a changing, modernized world. Barks scowls at Space-Age America's fads and fancies, and declares most of it piffle.

In Cole's case, as my friend and colleague Paul Tumey has surmised, it might have been shame and feelings of personal inadequacy--the sense that nearly 20 years spent in comics may have been a squandering of his creative life-force.

We shall never know for certain what motivated Cole to the bleak themes and actions of his last years. Barring yet-undiscovered data, we may also never know for certain what changed Stanley's world-view at the close of the 1950s.

Stanley became less concerned with character, and more with cause and effect, in his post-Lulu comics. This is especially evident in his Nancy and Sluggo stories. The characters are almost completely shorn of defining characteristics. They're less characters than icons, symbols, or game-pieces.

Indeed, their stories read like chess matches. The storytelling passion that informs the best years of Stanley's Lulu is now cooled. An omniscient, indifferent hand moves the pieces around the "board" of the pages and panels. The moves and counter-moves of the game-pieces are still archly comedic. This is a masterful hand--one with experience and confidence. The personal connection is minimal.

Yet this wise guiding hand is not cynical. Perhaps Stanley decided to streamline his process. Streamlining and ease of efforts were goals of the Space Age mindset. The 19th century of America business had been all about doing big things the hard way. The post-war attitude was all about comfort, ease of use and not breaking a sweat.

In this push-button, spray-can age, the less effort expended, the better the product. Stanley does not break a sweat in his Nancy and Sluggo stories. Neither does he phone them in. In this first segment of the 1960 summer camp special, the Space-Age push-button approach dominates--as does a more reflexive, brassy comedic sense...

These books' inside front covers were illustrated contents pages that read like the pre-credits teasers of '50s TV shows. These panels are not direct lifts from the stories inside. They're bouillon cube moments that sometimes conflate events. All the major themes of Stanley's Nancy and Sluggo are highlighted on this black-and-white intro page.

As with the Little Lulu summer camp specials, this book is a suite of short, inter-connected stories. They cut back and forth to different sub-plots which, as the final teaser panel above notes, converge.

The most interesting character in Stanley's Nancy universe is Sluggo. He is the sort-of Tubby to Nancy's quasi-Lulu. Yet Sluggo is far more the outsider than the eccentric but socially connected Tubby.

Sluggo has no parents, no relatives, and no means of visible support. He lives on his own in a ramshackle (abandoned?) house, its lawn strewn with junkyard tidbits, its inside squalorous.

Sluggo's dilemma is known to all, and although he has some societal acceptance, he's still left to fend for himself. He is an abandoned soul just trying to cope.

In both the N&S summer camp specials, Sluggo is excluded from the woodsy ritual. As all his friends joyously prepare for their summer of sylvan fun, Sluggo faces a summer alone and further abandoned...

Desperate and hopeful, Sluggo tries to impress the powers-that-be, and to thus win a free ticket to summer-camp fun. His efforts to succeed incur the wrath of one of Stanley's most frightening characters, the sociopathic hair-trigger Mr. McOnion. Run, Sluggo, run!

The creeping, inexorable and passionless pursuit of Sluggo by McOnion is deeply disturbing stuff. It's clearly supposed to be funny. Its nightmarish quality (relentless pursuit, in which the pursued never escapes or gets ahead) is as vivid as the subconscious mind-fudgery of Stanley's "horror comics" of 1961-62.

Meanwhile, we encounter the other sociopathic anti-star of the N&S universe, Rollo Haveall. Rollo is easily the most malicious of Stanley's "evil rich" characters. He outdoes the worst excesses of Little Lulu's rich kid Wilbur, via his own dispassionate agenda.

Wilbur van Snobbe can be an a-hole, but he does have human feelings. Via his conflicts with Lulu and her friends, Wilbur occasionally cottons to the idea that humanity trumps material wealth. Rollo is a robotic blend of Richie Rich and Hitler Youth. Wealth automatically entitles him to do whatever he wants. He doesn't question his motives; he has been bred for superiority. If anyone is harmed, money will hush them up.

There's no joy in Rollo's antics. At first, his droll indifference to humanity earns some shock-value chuckles. But extended exposure to his toxic persona proves as disturbing as McOnion's slow... plodding... death march.

Stanley's most imaginative decoration to the N&S world was the other-worldly Oona Goosepimple. This Charles Addams-esque monster-child anticipates the "funny horror" craze of the mid-1960s, which included the popular TV series The Munsters and The Addams Family and John Stanley's original creation for comics, Melvin Monster.

Like Lulu's improvised fairy-stories, Oona was a release-valve for the formulaic constraints of this licensed property. It gave Stanley a place to express himself, and a forum for free-form thinking. His Nancy books perk up noticeably when they focus upon Oona and her inexplicable, topsy-turvy universe.

Note that the artist on this one story is not Dan Gormley. The pen line is looser and spikier. I'm not sure who illustrated "Oona Takes the Subway..." Tony Tallarico, possibly...?

We then return to the recognizable world for some campground shenanigans. Another Stanley invention, the gluttonous Eadie, appears.

We end this first installment with the pursuit of Sluggo by McOnion. His emotionally neutral affect is particularly disturbing here--as are his multiple-personality mood swings. This is Child Abuse 101, presented as zany Space-Age fun!

 to be continued...

Deadly-Serious Funnies: Andy Panda in "The Mad Dog Mystery" (Dell one-shot #85, 1945)

There was some interest in seeing this early long John Stanley narrative. By no means is this among Stanley's better work. It is a decent example of his storytelling skills, largely devoid of his characteristic comedy.

A couple of tics emerge throughout this deadly-serious story. One is the eccentric 1940s beardo who appears early in the story. He gives the story a false comedic start that's immediately replaced by a Fredric Brown/Dorothy Hughes-esque mystery, garnished with Hitchcockian suspense set-pieces.

Well, take 15 minutes and read it yourself. Then we'll talk...

There is a fair deal of incidental comedy throughout "The Mad Dog Mystery." I dare say that the phrase "I'd walk a skunk for ten bucks!" is the funniest comment I've encountered so far today.

A mild theme of wartime intrigue gives the narrative some decent stakes. Stanley almost never included topical references in his work. Whereas Walt Kelly and Carl Barks played up the America-at-war angle for maximum drama and laffs in their contemporary stories, John Stanley disengaged from the realities of the day.

Kelly, in particular, played up the fifth-column angle like mad in his "Our Gang" stories, which "The Mad Dog Mystery" rather resembles with its rambly plot and childish protagonists. Barks, as in his "Terror of the River" and "Ghost of the Grotto," would have made the bad guys much more sinister in appearance.

The sequence in the houseboat is particularly Barksian. Left to die in the sinking, scuttled houseboat, Andy Panda and Charlie Chicken stoically prepare to meet their maker. Sheer practical survival-thinking--and a poor plastering job--save the day. The cramped 12-panel grid of the wartime Dell comics adds to the tension and sense of inescapable threat that pervades this sequence--and the whole story.

Stanley often gives a lumpen ordinariness to his antagonists. The traitorous scientist (and member of Stanley's antiques-loving Evil Rich) Klinker is a frumpy, seemingly ineffectual fellow. He's distinguishable from the cops who burst in as an un-needed deus ex machina at story's end. Klinker is slighter, more composed and less earthy than the derbied dicks.

The theme of the Evil Rich was a constant throughout Stanley's comics writing. Here is where he and Carl Barks part ways with a vengeance. Scrooge McDuck is a frequent violator of human rights--a driven individual who will stop at nothing to increase his already-absurd level of wealth. He has almost no time for anything but money.

Stanley's wealthy are idle aesthetes who fiddle with antiques, paintings and other trappings of the good life. Their actual money is almost never seen--in contrast to Scrooge McDuck's iconic Money Bin, and its owner's orgasmic rolls-in-the-hay with his cash. Money is the fetish-object of Scrooge McD's life. The trappings of wealth are the end-goal of Stanley's Evil Rich.

In Stanley's world, it is preferable for the elite to admire their Van Goof canvases, esoteric upholsteries of the 16th century, statuary, rare coins, books and whatnot. This keeps them distracted from the genuine harm and suffering their money and power can cause other people.

"The Mad Dog Mystery," a sorta-sequel to "The Secret Six," Stanley's Oswald Rabbit thriller of the same year, suffers from the vagueness of Klinker's actions. We never learn exactly what Klinker does--or how it helps "the enemy."

There is that canister of carefully-labeled lethal gas--the agent of Klinker's undoing, and a rare moment when Stanley's work aligns with the crude doings of the super-hero comics genre. Comics' mad scientists always seem to have such a clearly-marked supply of dangerous acid, gas or poison on hand. I'm pretty sure it was in their contracts to do so.

Stanley was usually alert about genre cliches and how to bend them. Such occurrences are usually tongue-in-cheek in his work.

Of course, this is from the early period of Stanley's career as a comics writer. He was still learning, and still forming the vision that became so distinct by the later 1940s. The relentless flow of the narrative may have eddied into a corner, and forced this obvious plot-point.

"The Mad Dog Mystery" has one of many occurrences of consequential cross-dressing in Stanley's oeuvre. Boys dressed as girls, and vice versa, are a common sub-theme in Little Lulu and Tubby. The stakes for these kids are as high as Prof. Klinker's herein.

Stanley's minor stories, among which "The Mad Dog Mystery" resides, reveal as much about their creator as his most acclaimed and important work. Like his characters, John Stanley was driven by apparent compulsions to repeat certain themes, actions and devices.  He refined them, over time, but they remained central to his work as a storyteller and artist.