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[The Australian Panther]

To everybody's surprise, including mine, I'm taking a leaf out of Robb's book and choosing a funny animal book, albeit one that heavily features Walt Kelly.
After Barks, Kelly is probably my favorite funny animal creator, - well maybe after Herriman's Krazy Kat, if that counts as a funny animal strip.
Animal Comics 09
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=16736

And I'll respond to the last pick  down the track a bit, my heads not in that space at this time.
After an active day I'm in front of the heater- its early spring here in the mountains - and reading an 'Easy Rawlins'  novel while listening to late 60's  Danish blues rock band, Young Flowers' on YouTube.  Chillin'
Just sayin' !


   

[paw broon]

Oh, I think Krazy Kat counts. 1 - it's funny: 2- it's an animal: 3- it's a comic strip.  And, it's pure genius.
As for this one,  I still don't get it.  Lovely cover though.
Uncle Wiggily is creepy and ugly.
Blackie:- Horrible wee sheep, but the wolf is good.  Some amusing slapstick in this story.
Pogo is a lovely character but the deer, that's creepy looking as well.
Hector:-  I liked the ants and the mad paddles.
Lion Dog, oh no.  Not for me.  If you want doggy stuff, beautifully drawn and written try Black Bob.
Sorry old beans.  I know I'll get pelters for this, but that's what I thought of the comic.

[SuperScrounge]

Elephunnies - cute. 

Uncle Wiggily - Feels like a couple of short stories stitched together rather than a single story. Okay, but nothing special.

How To Outsmart A Wolf - Okay.

Ol' Albert Is Really A Deer - I keep forgetting how ugly Pogo was in the beginning. Otherwise a fun story.

Hector The Henpecked Rooster - Mildly amusing.

Buzzy - Meh. The story is simplistic enough it seems aimed at kids, but then it has the questionable morality to say that something isn't a fib if you're trying to trick somebody. Ugh.

Lion Dog - The title would make more sense if the writer used the term mountain lion instead of, or in addition to, the term cougar. The ideas are more interesting than the story.

Monkey Biz - Cute.

Elephunnies 2 - Hehehe!

[Robb_K]

Cover - A far too young Uncle Wiggily, and his grandniece and grandnephew, otherwise drawn very well by Walt Kelly. 
He drew most of the covers for Animal Comics.  During the same period of most of the 1940s, he was also drawing most of the covers for Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, and most of Dell's Folk and Fairy Tale and Santa Claus/Christmas comics.  He was the workhorse for Western Publishing's children's comic books line, including his own Albert The Alligator/Albert & Pogo, and Pogo Comic Books.

Elephunnies Gag #1
Nice artwork by Kelly. Funny gag, too.

Uncle Wiggily - Written by Gaylord DuBois (As Howard Garis), drawn by H.R. McBride
Not such a coherent story.  More of an attempt to replicate the traditional moral folk tales
with a new one, that is a bit weak compared to most of Garis' stories.

Blackie Lamb - How To Outsmart A Wolf - Drawn well by animator/storyboarder Tom Golden.  Blackie's brains (quick thinking) outwit The Bad Wolf, in a moral tale that doing wrong leads to bad results.  Very expected, but nice artwork and a couple funny scenes makes it palatable.

Albert The Alligator - is Really A Deer Written and drawn by Walt Kelly
Nice artwork and stereotypical US Southern humour, by Kelly in the early stages of his career and development of his Pogo and Albert and their Bayou comic Universe in the pre-Pogo Newspaper Strip comic book period.  A typical Walt Kelly character traits and gag-driven comedy scenario, rather than a tight, logical story plot and storyline typical of Carl Barks.
This was Kelly's early period, when the little African-American boy, named Bumbazine, was Albert's main foil, and much more important than Pogo (who at this time, was rather ugly, and a minor character).  Uncle Antler, the Moose is quite an interesting character.  I like the artwork, and the gags.  I find it interesting that Kelly was born and raised, and lived his whole life in The Northern states of USA, except for his time in Los Angeles with Disney Studio, which is also nothing like The South.  He was infatuated with a romantic, nostalgic view of the lazy, old, slow-moving rural South, after spending a couple short vacations there.  But, his made-up fantasyland had little resemblance to the way The South really had ever been, and his faked southern rural accent has no ring of truth to it.  It is more based on stereotypical-based "bad guessing".

Hector The Henpecked Rooster written by John Stanley, and drawn by animator, Rube Grossman, based on the Famous Studios' animated film character.
This story is a moral tale in which the power greed of Mrs. Leghorn leads to her demise and incarceration in the police station drunk tank, or a medical mental fatigue rest home.  It has some funny gags, which makes it mildly entertaining.  But isn't very clever.

Buzzy Bee Text Story Drawings by animator, Dan Gormley
Fairly dull and boring story aimed at little children teaching a negative moral - that it is acceptable to lie to someone if you want to trick them even for selfish reasons that help only yourself.  I think the people who wrote those text stories cranked them out in only a few minutes, and didn't think much at all about them, and didn't read them over again before submitting them, thinking (perhaps knowing) that not only did the kids and their parents not read them, but EVEN their editors didn't read them.  They were MUCH better money makers for story writers than regular drawn comic book stories were, because the storywriters had to draw the storyboards for them if they were also an artist, and that required lots of time thinking about how to lay out the panel art.  If the writer wasn't an artist, and he or she didn't draw even stick figures, he or she then had to write an outline describing what would be drawn in each panel on each page, in addition to what would be written in all the narrative boxes, and all the dialogue balloons, which took a lot of time to type up using the old-fashioned typewriters.

Lion Dog (realistically-drawn story) written by Gaylord Dubois, and drawn by Arthur Jamison.  It was a decent semi-realistic story of a lost dog puppy being adopted by a mother cougar.  It was mildly interesting, but I didn't like those realistic-style stories, as a child, because I read Animal Comics, and all Funny Animal Comics, because I liked the animation-style artwork and other-worldly non-realistic characters, and NOT because I was an animal lover.  I always loved our family dogs.  But I certainly didn't equate them with cartoon-based "funny animals", or relate them in any way.  But, apparently Western Publishing/Dell thought that animal-loving kids would like to read stories about both extremely cartoony funny animal characters, as well as realistically drawn, realistic stories about real animals and real people.  I don't believe very many people wanted BOTH of those styles in the same book. If I remember correctly, ALL 30 Animal Comics had at least one realistically drawn story.  I believe that the fanatical funny animal fans only barely tolerated the realistic stories in those books, and many of them never even read them, or even looked closely at those pages.

Monkey Biz Written and drawn by Walt Kelly.  Nice art and mildly amusing gag.

Elephunnies Gag #2 Written and drawn by Walt Kelly.  Nice art and funny gag.

[gregjh]

Animal comics are not really my style. I enjoyed elephunnies but  the first two stories afterwards were not something I would want to return to. Normally I complain about comic stories being too short but Uncle Wiggily was actually too long as it was a group of gags, not a story. How to outsmart a wolf was simply using animals instead of kids and a school bully.

After that I just jumped to the second Elephunnies and finished up :-)

But once again, even if the comic is not something I rate, I enjoy reviewing it, reading the reviews of others and having the free time to return to this site.

[crashryan]

This is much earlier than the Animal Comics I've read before. The whole book has the feel of a work in progress. The major attraction is Walt Kelly's artwork. He got better but he's already very good.

The biggest takeaway I got from Uncle Wiggily is that for seven decades I've had his name wrong. I would have sworn it was spelt WIGGLY but it's really WIGGILY. How about that. The drawing is pretty good, though so many panels are staged with the camera so far back that I felt I was sitting in the back row peering at the screen. The story goes on and on without ever seeming to have a point.

I'd never heard of Blackie and I found myself wandering off reading about and watching Famous Studios cartoons. They suffered the same shortcoming as Fleischer Studios cartoons: technically excellent but saddled with poor stories. This comic version is so-so. Story and art both just adequate.

Albert is Such a Deer is the book's high point. Kelly's timing is so much better than the other writers'. I love puns and word play, and Kelly delivers both. The sour note is the kid, Bumbazine. Not because of the way he's portrayed, but because a human being, even a cartoony one, clashes with the talking-animal universe. I read a couple of other early Alberts and saw Kelly also showed us Bumbazine's father. The cognitive dissonance wasn't as bad as Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent, but it was a good thing Kelly dropped humans from the series.

Walt Kelly was more sympathetic to minority characters than most of his contemporaries, but he wasn't above naming his character after his skin color (bombazine was a silk fabric popular in the 19th century. It was often dyed black and used for funeral clothes). One can't complain about Bumbazine's dialogue, though. Everyone speaks that weird pseudo-southern patois.

Hector the Henpecked Rooster had some funny moments but the characters are unappealing.

No one else liked Lion Dog but I did. The story was pleasant and the art good. Personally I don't mind real animals comingling with funny animals.

The Elephunnies pages were fun fillers. I particularly liked the posing on the back cover.

In all, an entertaining read well worth the time.

[The Australian Panther]

Well! This book didn't inspire many comments, did it? Then again it's been a quite couple of weeks overall for posts on CB+.
The cover.
Memory says thqt that characters playing instruments and marching - with someone carrying a flag was a common motif for US comic covers. The visual perfectionist in me doesn't like mastheads in blocks which chop off the cover illustration. It's just an ear, but it ruins the cover a lot.
But well drawn by Kelly.
Elephunnies.
Nice verbal gag by Kelly. More on that later.
Its probably more difficult than most of us realize to do a page gag with no dialogue - tell the whole story in pictures? Amusing but not A+ for the gag tho.
Uncle Wiggily.
Little story. This character is essentially unknown in Australia. However, when I was about 5 years old I was given an Uncle Wiggily board game. It was a simple card and dice game - move around the board and the first to the end wins. The only reason I remember that game was that I never knew who Uncle Wiggily was!
Actually, looking at this story brings back other memories. We have 'the Pipsewah and the Skeezicks'. I think they were in the game too., Caused you to lose points. No idea what they are either.
I think we need to keep in mind the age group this story is intended for - probably no older than seven.  And 7 year-olds who didn't have access to the internet, TV or mobile phones.
What do the pirates want to ransom Uncle? 'Two dozen cakes and a bushel of cookies."
And what does Uncle reply? ' If you get them, you'll get indigestion. No good comes from being bad you know.' So yes, something of a moral tale and aimed at young children.
The genre of the tale is an Odyssey - the character is taken out of her/his comfort zone into a seemingly random series of adventures, which the author is actually using to make a series of points. [a long trip or period involving a lot of different and exciting activities, esp. while searching for something]
So,the original Odyssey and Alice in Wonderland to  name two.
And in keeping with that Genre, the central character ends up back home with his family and friends.
I think if I read that story at that age, I would have thoroughly enjoyed it.
The art is as good as it needs to be.
Blackie - 'Famous studios' so I guess they had to credit the studio as you would Disney or Walter Lantz.
Art very basic. For a strip based on an animated cartoon, it surprises me how much the story relies on verbal dialogue. And the art doesn't add much to the narrative. Wolf and three little pigs - except here its 5 little sheep - was also a staple for early animated cartoons. Slapstick and I guess beginner work from Tom Golden. Not the high point of the book.
Ol' Albert is really a Deer
To refer back to my earlier comment on Walt Kelly, he starts with a pun and makes it clear that he was not just an excellent draftsman but something of a verbal master too. Maybe too much for a comic like this.
I don't know why he was attracted to 'southern' dialogue - as was AL Capp - but it does add something to the work, gives it a whimsical flavor somehow.
The first panel is a cliche, except not Red Ridling Hood, and a Wolf, no here we have Blue bouncing Deer and an Alligator.
I can go back after reading the story through and concentrate on the art.
On the first page of the story look at the face of 'Upso Daizy' in panel 3. Pure innocence?
And Albert's phony smile in the next panel.
On the second page of the story, the story is carried forward verbally but the illustrations amplify the narrative. This is like music.
Third page. Upsa Daisy has been taken advantage of - dilemma. Enter Pogo Possum - do-gooder and Bumbazine.
Bumbazine is a young negro boy, not an animal. And surprisingly, for the period, he is not drawn as a 'gollywog -type character.
I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow of the rest of this story, but the word play and nonsense here puts me in mind of England's the Goon Show'
Hector the Hen-pecked Rooster.
'Keeping up appearances' with Fowls. Nuff said!
Keeping Up Appearances Season 1 Episode 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEmznMX-jV0
Probably my dads favorite show.
Buzzy - I generally don't read text pieces.
Lion Dog
I'm a dog man and its a well-told tale. What's not to like.
Monkey Biz,
Not much of a gag and another parade with musical instruments.
Elepunnies 2
Pride goeth before a fall.
At the age of 7 - or even a bit older - I would have enjoyed this and maybe learned a few things.
And, that's all folks!
     

[SuperScrounge]

The cover.
Memory says thqt that characters playing instruments and marching - with someone carrying a flag was a common motif for US comic covers.

Well, there is a well-known painting called The Spirit of '76 that they are usually based on.

[lyons]

Great cover - good artwork and stories throughout.  An entertaining read.  Thanks Panther.