High Stakes and Hassled Hubbies: "Hector the Henpecked Rooster" from Animal Comics 12, 1944

Finding material for this blog has become an increasing challenge this year. More of John Stanley's comics are in print in 2010 than at any time in the past 60 years. Stories I featured here in 2008 and '09 have since been officially reprinted in books like The TOON Treasury, Art In Time, The Golden Treasury of Krazy Kool Klassic Kids' Komics and Dark Horse and Drawn + Quarterly's ongoing Stanley reprint projects.

Aside from a few still-elusive issues of New Funnies, and the archaeological comix digs I still do through Dell Comics' back pages, there's fewer stories for me to choose from. I could, of course, run Little Lulu and Tubby stories, which are proven crowd-pleasers, but most of those are in print--or will be by the end of 2011.

So I sift through the remaining nooks and crannies. Occasionally I still have the good fortune to unearth stories such as today's humble offering.

John Stanley was about a year away from his first "Little Lulu" stories when he wrote a short batch of stories for the Dell anthology Animal Comics. Best-known as the birthplace of Walt Kelly's "Albert the Alligator" (retitled Pogo for its newspaper version, starting in 1948), Animal Comics was a hodge-podge of original material and licensed entities. The latter included Howard Garis' "Uncle Wiggily" and, for a year, newly-born characters from Famous Studios, the surviving entity of what had once been the Max Fleischer Studios.

Famous' "Noveltoons" series provided a fairly good simulacrum of the West Coast cartoons of the MGM and Warner Brothers studios, with flowing, full animation, lush Technicolor and striking musical scores by Sammy Timberg and Winston Sharples.

They struggled to create star characters. Blackie Lamb was the studio's attempt at a Bugs Bunny. A darker, more interesting series starred a feathered victim of spousal abuse, Hector Chicken. His bull-dozing, hyper-masculine wife runs and ruins his life. Only via the assistance of street-wise Herman Mouse, who scares the battle-axe $h!tless, is Herman ever briefly re-acquainted with his testicles.

Coincidentally, Famous also produced a series of Little Lulu animated cartoons, some of which are pretty good, tho' they take a far different path with the characters than the John Stanley version.

Stanley wrote a handful of these Famous-derived stories before the studio revoked their license. The Famous characters eventually wound up at Harvey Comics. Harvey bought the rights to all the Famous characters in the late 1950s. By this time, they'd been dumbed down almost to oblivion.

The early Famous Studios cartoons have much to offer, and have undergone a critical rediscovery over the past decade.

Famous' material was always dark. At worst, it was merely brutal and cruel. The underlying bleakness of their characters and scenarios somehow aligned with similar tendencies in John Stanley's writing.

This "Hector" story riffs off the Famous cartoon The Henpecked Rooster (1944). It does much more with the set-up than Famous ever managed. It also offers this first acknowledgment of a vital element in John Stanley's writing:

Stanley's characters almost never address the issue of stakes, but stakes-raising is the backbone of his narrative skill. He excelled at the creation of a problematic situation which gets increasingly worse--usually from the actions of his stories' self-obsessed, deluded protagonists.

Hector is a far cry from Tubby Tompkins, John Stanley's finest realization of this essential archetype. In this story, Stanley raises the potential for stakes-raising in his narratives, while effortlessly blending storytelling with incisive comedy. 

The plot of this story is similar to the 1935 W. C. Fields comedy Man on the Flying Trapeze. Stanley followed in Fields' footsteps in his depictions of enmeshed, co-dependent and deeply unhappy unions.

Like Fields, Stanley sided with the underdog in these effed-up relationships--which is most often the male. These unfortunates have let themselves settle for a bad situation. They're stuck with a disagreeable, inflexible mis-match, and do nothing to extricate themselves from the engulfing mire of their dilemma. They sigh, tuck their chins in and resign themselves to a lifetime of bickering and nit-picking.

Stanley's start for this story is remarkably like Fields' Trapeze. Though these stories part ways rather quickly, the obvious influence of the Fields movie is fascinating here.

For that matter, it's likely that the Famous Studios story men knew and liked the Fields films, and swiped their basic set-up from Trapeze, It's A Gift, You're Telling Me or The Bank Dick. All these movies feature Fields' grumbling, long-suffering anti-hero trying to cope with an impossible spouse. Fields' cinematic wives are hectoring, ranting killjoys. Simply by staying true to himself, even in these lessened circumstances, Fields' character wins in the end of these movies. Hid triumphs are tenuous, and it is painfully clear that he's doomed to quickly return to the ruts of bad behavior they have dug for himself.

Hector's married life is nightmarish.  His wife owns his cojones--and she's also a cannibal!

Through the smart-ass assistance of Herman and his mice brethren, Hector turns the tables on his trouble-making spouse--but the stakes are rather extreme. Chances are she'll be angrier--and meaner--than ever, upon her release from the mental hospital!

Corrosive relationships abound in Stanley's work; Loo and Sid, the candy store owner, in Dunc 'n' Loo, the pre-teen triangle of Tubby, Gloria and Wilbur in Little Lulu; Jimmy Fuzzi and Judy Junior in Thirteen Going on Eighteen and most of the character relationships in Nancy and Sluggo and Melvin Monster have something askew--or harmful--at their core.

The finished artwork for this story may have been drawn by a moonlighting Famous Studios staffer. The layout and staging are clearly of Stanley's hand. His 1940s comics are mostly set in home interiors. These settings are quite familiar to readers of his Little Lulu or New Funnies material. Whereas Carl Barks took his characters to exotic, far-flung settings for his comic book stories, John Stanley stuck close to home. No research was required, and the familiarity of the settings makes these stories still resonate with 21st-century readers.

Why circle the globe for trouble when it's all found in your living room, kitchen and bedroom? The dark domestic comedy of John Stanley offers us a reasonable world, and relatable human struggles and failings. Even in a minor work such as this, Stanley's vision is evident.

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...

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.

Killer, Not Filler Pt. III--Complete Set of 18 John Stanley WOODY WOODPECKER One-Pagers!

Go HERE to view the complete set of 18 one-page, one-color "Woody Woodpecker" gag pages, as written and drawn by John Stanley in 1947! This revamped, fancied-up post is finally finished!

It's taken me awhile to get all of these, but I'm happy to offer them all for your perusal. These are an important part of John Stanley's work as a cartoonist-writer!

Drat, I'm not able to write enough copy to fill out the space beside this teaser graphic!

Maybe...

now...

yes! >whew<