I grew up reading Disney (Carl Barks), and other "Funny Animal", and cartoony Human comedic Comics in the late 1940s, and 1950s, but also had many of those starting from about 1940, as hand-me downs from older cousins with whom I lived (in Canada, The Netherlands and USA). I've been a comic book storywriter, storyboard artist, and cover sketch artist since 1985. I stopped buying US and Dutch comics during the early 1960s. Due to storage constraints, I only kept my 1940-1964 Disney Comics.
I found Comic Book + when Googling "Ken Hultgren comic book stories". I knew he, and many other animators at Disney Studios, left in the 1941 strike, and worked for comic book publishers (i only knew they worked for Western Publishing/Dell. I read that many of them worked also for Sangor/Hughes Studios in New York. That sent me directly to a page full of Giggle, HaHa, Barnyard, CooCoo, Happy and Goofy comic book covers (all of which contained stories drawn by Hultgren). I clicked on one, and it led me to your website's download/reading pages of that book. I was immediately hooked. Those books contained terrific art drawn mainly by current and former animation artists from Disney, WB, MGM, Lantz, Fleischer, and the other animation studios, ALL of which I had NEVER SEEN, or even knew that they existed.
Growing up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Den Haag, Netherlands, and later, Chicago, I NEVER saw ANY of those Creston/ACG or Better/Standard funny animal comics on the newstand, grocery store, or drug store shelves. Were they only regional? I DO have scans of one very small Canadian series"Merry-Go-Round Comics" - but they must have operated only in Ontario. We had Disney in The Netherlands (1952), and WB, MGM, and Lantz, later. But, none of the non-big studio US lines. We did have our own from Marten Toonder (Panda, Thom Poes), and other comics like Suske & Wiske.
I've been reading your books for a couple years, and downloading stories from various Internet sources for a couple years, and receiving many from friends. As I want to obtain digital copies of ALL (or most) of the US 1936-1960 funny animal and cartoony comical Human character comics (except for those whose art is not very good, but also want those that have extremely witty comedy or terrific stories, even if the art is not very good).
I hope not only to download comic books and comic strips from this website, but also to privately swap individual story scans and whole book scans from both PD and non-PD with other members, to fill in the books I am currently missing. Of course, I will make any PD scans I have, which Comic Book + does NOT have, available to the website, if they will meet their standards.
