"Indaboopadilly!" (or "Baby, It's Cold Inside"): John Stanley's Last "Tom And Jerry" Story of 1946;Our Gang Comics 22

John Stanley's first run on his first regular comic book series, "Tom and Jerry," ended abruptly in early 1946.

The runaway popularity of his "Little Lulu" comics, still part of Dell's one-shot monthly "Four Color" series, took its toll on Stanley's other comics efforts in this year.

Stanley stuck with his New Funnies features through 1947, as other writers and artists were phased into his shoes. He would return to Our Gang, in 1948, for a brief but brilliant second act that remains one of comics' hidden gems.

His first departure ended a remarkable trifecta of talent in Dell's Our Gang Comics.

For roughly a dozen issues, lucky wartime comics readers got a knockout combo of Walt Kelly, Carl Barks and John Stanley with their purchase of this ten-cent comic. They also got Charles Hedinger's "Flip 'n' Dip," which approached the high level of this work with its sharp drawing and keen knockabout wit.

As with Stanley's work for New Funnies, the "Tom and Jerry" stories are a mixed lot. With this post, all of his first run of significant Our Gang stories are available on this blog. Some of them are little masterpieces; others betray late deadlines, disinterest or a bad hangover.

John Stanley Would Have Been 100 on March 22nd...

...and I'd be a cad, a bounder and my typically forgetful self if I didn't note this here!

To celebrate, here is a never-before-seen piece of John Stanley art, courtesy his son James. This was a sketch for one of the new pieces Stanley did in the 1980s. As James said in a note to me, "too bad it wasn't finished off in color." I agree.

That said, I always find joy in John Stanley's rough drawings. His pencil line has great energy and character.

Here it is...

With irony noted, this post occurs on Carl Barks' birthday.

"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.

Dressmaker's Dummy Leads Teenage Pals Into Hitchcockian Screwball Nightmare: 31-page story from Henry Aldrich 4, 1951

Given how poorly my 1960s John Stanley Bibliography has sold, I'm feeling rather discouraged about the hard work it will take to put together the 1950s volume. In the work I've done so far, if only to satisfy my own curiosity, I've made some pleasant discoveries and done some re-evaluations.

The richest vein I've struck is in the early 1950s title Henry Aldrich, which Stanley wrote for his most talented collaborator, the cartoonist Bill Williams.

As Stanley entered his most beloved period on the best-selling Marge's Little Lulu title, and just before he took up cartooning again for the eclectic Marge's Tubby spinoff, he wrote several issues of this teenage analog to Lulu and Tubby.

Stanley's Aldrich material is often surprisingly sophisticated, and the book's unusual format allowed him to experiment with story lengths. Today's offering is one of Stanley's longest regular-issue narratives: 31 pages of unfolding comedic mayhem, tinged with black humor and featuring two protagonists who never quite understand why their actions have such a strong effect on the world around them.

"Homer"-- A Fascinating Forecast of John Stanley's 1960s Work, One Decade Early

I have posted examples of John Stanley's work on the early 1950s series Henry Aldrich here in the past.

As time has gone by, my study of this series' early issues has gradually revealed much more of Stanley's input than I first realized.

Stanley wrote the entirety of the first two issues of Henry, skipped the third, and returned with the fourth. The skipped third issue threw me off for a few years. I finally sat down and carefully read these comics.

To my pleasant surprise, Stanley's work appears through at least the 11th issue. I'm still going over the last half of the 22-issue run.

These stories, which are often quite long and detailed, are a fascinating precursor of Stanley's 1960s work on the series Dunc 'n Loo (also with Bill Williams) and 13 Going on 18. They show that these concepts did not appear out of the blue, for their creator, in the early 1960s.

The dawn of the 1950s saw an uneasy transition in John Stanley's writing. He repressed, consciously or not, the wilder extremes of his comedic sensibility. The frantic, everywhere-at-once affect of his 1940s work was suddenly muted.

Stan Lee Stories, Pt. 2: More Rip-offs from "The House of Ideas"--And A Story Starring "John Stanley"

Yes, this blog still lives, although it may appear to be on a life-support system. Short of the book project I hope to do someday (and which seems a hard sell, for reasons that baffle me), I feel that I've said all there is to say about John Stanley, in the format of this blog.

I could do a story-by-story analysis of his work, but that might kill all the joy of reading Stanley's comics for others. I believe that any reader curious about John Stanley can quickly gain a sense of who he was, and what his work was about, via the nearly 250 posts extant on this blog.

Here's something a bit more far-reaching than usual for this blog. This would be at home at one of my other comics criticism blogs, Comic Book Attic, which Paul Tumey and I occasionally revive.

Though his name was unknown to readers until the 1960s. Stanley was, certainly, a celebrity within the industry of the American comic book. His longstanding success as the writer/base artist of Marge's Little Lulu (which was a regular top 20 bestseller on US newsstands) made him a comics figure to watch--and emulate.

When the words "emulate" and "comics" are used in the same sentence, the company that would, one day, be Marvel Comics, springs instantly to mind. Timely-Atlas-Marvel built its publishing empire on borrowed ideas. To be fair, so did the rest of the comic book industry in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. If Company A published a popular title, Companies B-Z rushed out their simulacra ASAP, to get their chunk of coin while the gettin' was good.

In the post-war comics market, in which super-heroes were marginalized and genre comics such as crime, romance, war and funny animal were in, competitors did pulpy battle on America's newsstands. Martin Goodman's publishing empire, of which comics were one small but lucrative slice, led the field in providing ready-made imitations of any cresting trend.

Goodman's editor-writer Stanley Leiber closely watched the comics market and kept a large staff of artists (and freelancers) busy in post-war America with his copycat versions of others' innovations. To be fair once again, Lee did a certain amount of innovation. He began a line of short-story horror and fantasy comics just before the more celebrated Entertaining Comics (EC) inaugurated their line in 1950.

Running on Sheer Chutzpah: Little Lulu Four-Color One-Shot 158, 1947

One thing I must finish on this blog, as it reaches its end, is the remarkable run by John Stanley, Charles Hedinger and others on the one-shot issues of Little Lulu that precede its regular run.

This is the only Lulu one-shot that I own, although my copy is nothing to brag about. It is one of the worst-printed 1940s comics I've ever seen. When colors aren't wretchedly out of register, the black lines are fuzzy, clogged with ink, and otherwise bear all the signs of the end of a print run.

Thank goodness, I'll spare you a look at my version--these are top-drawer scans done by some anonymous kind soul a few years ago.

Many of the scans I've shared here, over the years, have come from such sources. I feel that I've never properly thanked these folks for all their hard, painstaking work in making these rare old comics available for study, reading and sharing (as I have done here with you).

These early Little Lulus suffer terribly when seen in black and white, as I've said before. Their simple contour lines were meant to be filled with the flat pastels and blunt primary colors of 1947 comics. Western's self-printed titles had a color palette all their own. After 1948, they are consistently well-printed comics. From 1943 to '47, buyer beware! Unless you somehow score a copy from the start of a press run, chances are the Dell title of this era will be a blurry, mis-registered mess.

But enough of that. Let's get down to brass knuckles, er, tacks. I usually choose a percentage of the stories in each of these one-shots. This book is so consistently great that I've opted to share the whole thing here today.