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[gregjh]

This is why we are so lucky to have this website. Three festive comics, each of a very high standard, for us to read free of charge thanks to the founder of this site.

My personal favourite was the Christmas Carol. Everybody knows this story and as long as it is well-rendered, it cannot disappoint. This version was sketched skillfully with Scrooge's demeanor being captured at the centre of almost every panel and the supernatural events striking our attention when needed. I'm a sucker for a good Christmas story and we all know they don't come much better than Dickens.

Thanks for these choices, Robb. I look forward to more festive comics soon.

[Morgus]

CHRISTMAS CAROL is great, like you all say. And they had time to go into some of the details that usually get left out of adaptations. The part about reading 'Arabian Nights' for instance. I read the book every few years or so and can vouch that they got a lot of the prose dead to rights. Anybody else think they use stills from some of the more famous movie versions as reference points? This isn't a complaint. It just would pop up now and again and I'd wonder.
And again, nothing wrong with that. It would save time if they did, but on the other hand was it just a case of people visually plotting out an identical scene in the same way? I may never know.
SUPER MOUSE or whatever he was made me laugh when they had Santa and his 'dwarves'. They should be 'elves' and I cannot for the life of me figure out how THAT slipped through. The laugh came when I remembered an old interview with Herve  Villechaize after he finally made it big. (Tattoo, from FANTASY ISLAND, remember?)
Anyway they asked him how things had changed for him and he replied he didnt have to play g... d... Santa Claus elves anymore.
I think my laugh over that was the most joy anybody got from the comic.
The Walt Kelly stuff was great visual at that time of his career, and the lettering like Crash' says was first rate as always. Made me go back and dig up some of the 'Boston Charlie' strips from later years.

[Robb_K]

CHRISTMAS CAROL is great, like you all say. (1) And they had time to go into some of the details that usually get left out of adaptations. The part about reading 'Arabian Nights' for instance. I read the book every few years or so and can vouch that they got a lot of the prose dead to rights. Anybody else (2) think they use stills from some of the more famous movie versions as reference points? This isn't a complaint. It just would pop up now and again and I'd wonder.
And again, nothing wrong with that. It would save time if they did, but on the other hand was it just a case of people visually plotting out an identical scene in the same way? I may never know.
SUPER MOUSE or whatever he was made me laugh when they had Santa and his 'dwarves'. They should be 'elves' and I cannot for the life of me figure out how THAT slipped through. The laugh came when I remembered an old interview with Herve  Villechaize after he finally made it big. (Tattoo, from FANTASY ISLAND, remember?)
Anyway they asked him how things had changed for him and he replied he didnt have to play g... d... Santa Claus elves anymore.
I think my laugh over that was the most joy anybody got from the comic.
The Walt Kelly stuff was great visual at that time of his career, and the lettering like Crash' says was first rate as always. Made me go back and dig up some of the 'Boston Charlie' strips from later years.

(1) I'm reasonably sure that this version of "A Christmas Carol" included at least a handful, if not a lot more direct quotes, or paraphrasing of contents from the original version of Dickens' novel.  There were several that I don't remember having been included in any of the films or TV adaptations, nor the comic book or abridged book shortened versions.

(2) I'm sure that the creators of this comic book adaptation DID use stills of at least one of the film adaptations as guides for the backgrounds, if not copying scene staging exactly.  IF they "copied" any scenes from a film, they did change up the camera angles, positioning of characters, and other aspects to their own vision, basically from the original novel, with a fair amount of room for interpretation, mainly to get a general "feel" for the atmosphere, but to keep enough freedom to make it their own vision.

I do that, myself, for stories that take place in the long past (times before my grandparents' birth), and those that require a setting that includes areas of life that are out of my own experience, but make sure that I use it as a reference, rather than copying scenes exactly, so that what I produce ends up being something almost totally new, instead of something the reader, looking for new entertainment experiences, has experienced before.

[Robb_K]

Santa’s Christmas Comic No. 1

Interesting funny animal comics for the time. Some good humorous art. I was going to comment on each story, but as I went on, some similar things kept coming up, so I’ll just comment specifically on a few and then make some general comments.

Supermouse in ‘A Super-Merry Christmas’

Fun story with some original elements. (1) Though if Terrible Tom had guns and bombs and cannons, wouldn’t they be able to take care of all the arctic friends that Supermouse rounded up? Though I can understand why a Christmas bloodbath might not have been the best story option In spite of plot holes galore, Supermouse was probably my favourite of the characters in this comic book. I probably would have liked this story when I was a little kid.

Goofy Gander in ‘Ship-A-Hooey’

Fun in a slapstick sort of way, with a few good one-liners. Would make a funny cartoon with visual gags.

Just a question for you comic historians, though. I’m not familiar with Goofy Gander, but (2) I was wondering how Walt Disney felt about this character when his Goofy seems to have predated this guy. Though I guess it also has that meaning that the gander is a bit goofy, so maybe it’s okay to have two funny animals with the same name. I just thought ‘Goofy’ was a more unique name for two characters than more common names like Mickey or Peter.

Bonny Bunny in ‘Tragic Magic’

This one did make me smile. Always fun when a trick backfires.

Happy Rabbit in ‘Revenge is Sweet’

Fairly involved plot that could fit the category ‘be careful what you wish for’. Interesting how scammers are still using some of the same ploys today, only with further reach on the internet. I’ve received one of those emails about a rich relative in Japan dying, and they will send me the million dollars as long as I provide my bank details. I wonder if those scammers started out by reading Dad’s and Grandad’s copies of Happy Rabbit?

Percy Pig in ‘A Vicious Cycle’

‘Half the time, women baffle me … and the rest of the time they puzzle me’. My husband would probably still say that 

Extras

I liked all the extra bits like the Christmas puzzles and board game, though it looks like the little tyke who owned this comic wasn’t so keen on them. I didn’t read the short stories, but they also added a bit extra. It would have been a good value-for-money comic back in the day.

General Comments

(3) This would have come later than the ‘Tom and Jerry’ type comics where it was fine to beat everyone up and do terrible things to each other. I never read those comics, but I remember seeing Tom and Jerry shorts at the movies, and I was never a big fan of those types of cartoons, even when I was a kid. A few of the stories in this book are in that category (e.g., the boss abusing Coocoo), and a lot of the characters are pretty mean to each other even when they’re supposed to be friends (e.g., the girlfriends who dump the boyfriends because they’re not rich or down on their luck; and the friends who hit Merton on the head with a mallet because he’d given his money away). I’m quite happy to read comic book violence where the good guys beat the bad guys, but I’ve never really been a fan of comics where friends, romantic partners and colleagues can also be mean to each other. Okay, I know these are comics and that real people can be mean, just not my favourite kinds of stories. But the art was good and there were some cute tales too. I probably wouldn’t seek out any more of these to read, and I don’t think I would have been crazy about these when I was a kid. That was a later era and I was a bigger fan of the Hanna-Barbera characters.

Thanks for the pick, Robb.
Cheers, QQ       

(1) Supermouse was an almost exact clone of Paul Terry's "Mighty Mouse", who, at first, ironically was called "Super Mouse".  "SuperMouse" actually started in comic books BEFORE "Mighty Mouse".  His whole character was about the downtrodden, weak mice, who were constantly victimized by the much bigger, and more powerful, Cats, finally getting a champion (from among their own ranks), who could defend them and also triumph over the cats (and also get sweet get revenge upon them).  That is similar to mice Jerry and Tuffy continuously physically mauling Tom Cat in films and comic books. 

Yes, 1952 was significantly after the slapstick-based mainly animation-style violence against Tom was toned way down , and mostly dropped out of the Tom and Jerry comic book stories, which since 1947 or '48, changed mainly to funny, but less harmful, tricks, and embarrassing situations.

(2) Goofy Gander was based on being a "Goofy" (e.g. dull-witted, silly, dizzy, imprudent, innocent) character.  It was a nickname, as was Dippy Dawg's nickname, "Goofy". Disney's "Goofy" was a dog, and Ned Pines' was a Gander.  So, I think it is hard to justify Pines having stolen a character Disney had copyrighted.  I doubt that Disney Worried about Pines' "Goofy Gander", as Pines' character was a side character, who at his highest point of popularity, only had his own regular story feature inside one comic book series (Goofy Comics), but never had his own book, named exactly after him, and including even more than one story featuring him.  Not to mention that Disney's series that featured Duck stories sold hundreds of times more issues than pines' did.

(3) We shouldn't be surprised that Ned Pines' books were filled with slapstick action-based stories, which were mainly a string of visual gags, and no decently-thought out plots.  Pines was Ben Sangor's son-in-law, whose whole operation, like Sangor's ACG, was built on using Sangor's Studio animators/comic book artists, as not only the story artists, but also the story writers.  Almost all Pines' storywriters had previously been in the storyboarding (so-called "story) departments" of the major cartoon studios.  Most of them had no training in literature-style writing.  So the so-called stories were mainly a bunch of visual gags with no real lines of logic to believable motivations.  They were nonsensical, and often come off as insulting to the reader.

[Quirky Quokka]

(3) We shouldn't be surprised that Ned Pines' books were filled with slapstick action-based stories, which were mainly a string of visual gags, and no decently-thought out plots.  Pines was Ben Sangor's son-in-law, whose whole operation, like Sangor's ACG, was built on using Sangor's Studio animators/comic book artists, as not only the story artists, but also the story writers.  Almost all Pines' storywriters had previously been in the storyboarding (so-called "story) departments" of the major cartoon studios.  Most of them had no training in literature-style writing.  So the so-called stories were mainly a bunch of visual gags with no real lines of logic to believable motivations.  They were nonsensical, and often come off as insulting to the reader.

Hi Robb

Thanks for all of the info you provided, but especially the points above re the cartoon artists. That explains a lot. When I was reading this book, I was thinking that there were a lot of sight gags that would have been funny in a cartoon, with sound effects, but didn't work so well as a story. Though the art was funny, I often felt something was lost in translation.

Cheers

QQ

[The Australian Panther]

Thriller Comics Library 109 - A Christmas Carol 
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=16719

On the first page art;- 'Less is more.'
This is masterpiece level work.
Any words of mind are superfluous.

0253 - Christmas with Mother Goose 
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=16719

Nicely designed cover.

Trace Whimsical Back to the 16th Century

Whimsical and the related nouns whim and whimsy all ultimately derive from whim-wham, a noun from the early 16th century that originally referred to an ornamental object or trinket. Later whim-wham, with its fun sound, came to refer to a fantastic notion or odd fancy. The word's origin isn't clear, but it's worth noting that the similar-sounding flimflam had, in its earliest use, a similar meaning referring to an odd or nonsensical idea or tale. Whim naturally came about as a shortened form of whim-wham, and whimsy and whimsical eventually followed. Whimsical now describes more than just decisions made impulsively, but things resulting from an unrestrained imagination, as in "whimsical children's book characters."
 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whimsical

That's what Walt Kelly's work is all about and he stretched whimsy into serious social commentary in POGO.
Here we see him developing his style which is actually already quite mature here.
I like the creativity involved in taking well-known nursery rhymes and stretching them out into something else that's just as valid. And not inferior in quality to the originals.   
We read this as adults - very mature adults most of us - and we forget that work like this was intended for children so young that might need to have it read to them.(While showing them the pictures.)  I remember my aunt reading this kind of stuff to her young nieces and nephew.
That's the Spirit in which I believe it's meant to be read.
I see foreshadowing of things he was to use in POGO.
Why did he choose to portray adult female animals with bonnets and aprons?
Got to admit, it works.
Of its time tho, but not quaint.
As for the third book, I am going to give it a miss. It's not in the same category as these  two.
Thank you Robb!
Some more Christmas cheer and something different tomorrow.