But the story, (if anyone would call it that), is completely inane, and as bad as any comic book story I have ever read.
Omigod! Robb, I never even read the story. I just "admired" the artwork. This story is appalling! It's the sort of thing I'd imagine contemporary "edgy" writers would do to deconstruct the funny animal genre. The prairie dogs are drawn cute and given sympathetic personalities. They're allowed to escape being eaten a couple of times. Then they're smashed with a rock and eaten by the happy coyote family. What the hell were they thinking? Unless the story was a mean trick by an editor or writer who hated funny animal comics. Very, very strange. And very badly drawn.
Yes! This "story" is rather like a Horror genre story drawn by an underground artist, in the vein of the "Bambi Meets Godzilla" cartoon.
During the early 1940s, most of the non-Disney, non-WB, non-Walter Lantz, non-MGM Funny Animal comic book stories were 4-7 pages long, and had no real plot/storyline, and were just a series of slapstick, animation-style gags, many, if not most of which, had no real "writer", but were laid out by the finishing artist in his preliminary storyboard drawings as he moved along (not knowing what would come next until he decided upon the next gag. Often they ended abruptly, as if the funding to pay him had run out. There was almost no thought to whether or not the ending matched the "point of the story" (for which there was none). They were, basically, just a sequence of drawings with no meaning. The so-called "writers" who were NOT the same person as the final artist, were also generally cartoonists, who drew storyboard sketches, were also budding or wannabe animators or comic strip artists, who didn't know how to properly construct a story.
The few people hired to write such comic book stories, who were NOT artists or art school students, or hobbyist cartoonists, were high school or college English language or literature major course students, who had no idea how to create a story structure properly for a cartoon-like character to occupy a few pages of sequential artwork with dialogue balloons. So, the general quality of these books was ridiculously poor. That fact, despite the existence of the Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, Floyd Gottfredson and other decent quality stories, gave that new genre a bad reputation, which made many young readers not even consider reading ANY Funny Animal comic books or stories.
For that reason, I am mainly a fan of good Funny Animal artwork, and really appreciate the excellent stories when I can discover them. Otherwise, I am only interested in the combination of lousy artwork and worthless so-called "stories" from the early days of comic books, in their context as part of the history of comic books, and development of that element of popular literature.
