Funnybooks by Barrier Michael

Author:Barrier, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520241183
Publisher: University of California Press

17

Animal Kingdoms

As John Stanley took up work on Little Lulu in the mid-1940s, what was emerging in Walt Kelly’s “Albert and Pogo” stories around the same time was constantly percolating ensemble comedy. Built less on real stories than on how eccentric characters bumped up against one another, this was a kind of comedy that was common in radio, on shows like those of Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Fibber McGee and Molly—not to mention Amos ’n’ Andy—but had no parallels in comic books and relatively few in newspaper comic strips, with prominent exceptions like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre, especially in its Sunday-page incarnation. Those cartoonists understood that the loose, open-ended comic-strip format was highly accommodating to a free flow of invention but was also forgiving when the cartoonist marked time for a few days while waiting for inspiration to return. It was a format made to order for the sort of cartoonist Kelly was becoming.

Kelly was, in the “Albert and Pogo” stories from 1944–47, a sort of comic-strip cartoonist in waiting—literally so, because heavily reworked versions of some of those stories, or parts of them, turned up a few years later in the Pogo strip. The differences were often subtle—matters of staging, gesture, and emphasis—but the cumulative effect was vast improvement. Kelly also improved rapidly as a draftsman after he began drawing the comic strip, and it benefited as well from his own lettering (or lettering that he supervised) in the dialogue balloons. The underlying problem with “Albert and Pogo” in comic books was that the characters were not sufficiently developed—and at first not sufficiently numerous—to sustain the kind of comedy that Kelly seemed to have in mind; and so he fell back on broader and cruder expedients.

In two stories, a year and a half apart, Kelly had Albert become “mean” in response to insults, suddenly looking and behaving more like a real alligator. The effect is startling because Albert, like Pogo, had become more Disney-like since his first appearance—that is, recognizable as the animal he was supposed to be, but with attributes (expressive eyes and mouth, hands that can grasp, upright posture) that permitted that animal to behave like a human being. In the fifth issue of Animal Comics, when Albert is at the train station, he indignantly declares to the humans who are fighting over who will own him: “I isn’t no dawg or hoss! I is a reg’lar hooman!”

Transformations like Albert’s into a “mean” version of himself were the kind of storytelling shortcut of which comic books were often guilty, and Kelly was guilty of others. In Animal Comics no. 15, June–July 1945, in the first story to elevate Pogo to costarring status under the title “Albert and Pogo,” there is a real villain, a medicine-show huckster of wolflike appearance who threatens Pogo with a knife. (This character could be confused with Seminole Sam, the fox con man of the comic strip, but the first such fox actually appeared in Animal Comics no.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.