I wondered why I enjoy classic animated cartoons but comics done in that style don't excite me. I think movement is the key. While we're watching all the crashing and bashing and squashing and stretching on the screen we don't notice that the "story" is just a bunch of physical comedy stunts strung together. The motionless comic page, no matter how well drawn, lacks that energy, so it's easy to see how thin the story is. Instead of relying mostly on visuals, the best animated-style creators (like Barks and Kelly) gave their stories a strong literary component in the form of complex plots and clever dialogue.
That said, the artwork in this comic is pretty good. The sour note is as others have already noted: all the characters are knock-offs of well-known cartoon stars. The bear, the Indian, and the horse are bad enough but Bobbles "I am not Droopy" the Dog takes the cake.
The stories are okay, though not particularly funny to this jaded grownup. One incident in the Foxy Fagan story makes me cringe: Droopy, sorry, Bobbles has built the rocket from scratch yet there's a knob on the dash that he hasn't tried--the one that happens to activate the rocket. If I were the editor I'd have bonged a frying pan on the writer's head for that one. It reminds me of a comic I made as a kid in which the heroes need a spaceship to pursue the villain. They walk past a park and find a rocket parked there beside a sign that reads, "Free rocket--take it." That's the same sophisticated plotting that went into the creation of Bobbles' dashboard knob.
The not-Li'l Hiawatha story has its moments but the art's much better than the story. It's a relief to have the kid speak in standard English instead of Tontoese.
"Pete and Tweet" is one of those that would have worked a lot better on the screen.
"Hick and Slick" has some lively cartooning but the story sinks because the "surprise" job is so painfully obvious.
"Bugsey Bear" offers some chuckles, anyway.
A couple of imaginative bits can't rescue the "Pancakes" story. I know, I know, it's a relic of its time. But we like to pretend that obnoxious racial caricatures were a product of some distant past. This story appeared only a couple of years before I was born, and I ain't an octogenarian yet.
When I see ads like the one on the inside back cover, I wonder: did fifty kids actually send in coupons? Did the publisher really cough up the fifty bucks to pay them? It's not like anyone was checking up on him. Each kid would have assumed somebody else won the prize. Or rather, that's what his parents would have told him, because the kid would have been certain HIS entry was the "neatest and most thoughtful."
One final note: the lettering on this book is pretty good. I especially like the vaguely Deco-style logos for Foxy Fagan and Pancakes.
Author
Topic: Week 45 - Foxy Fagan #2 (Read 2412 times)
