Into The Enchanted Forest !

Last week while I was plumbing the depths of a quintet of Harvey Comics collections I was also spending some time watching some vintage Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons. I picked this collection up earlier this year and it contains a wealth of Casper stuff. There are all 55 Casper cartoons made for theater release from 1945 to 1959 by Famous Studios (the former Fleisher Brothers operation) for Paramount Pictures. Also included are 26 new cartoons made in 1963 when the Casper TV show hit the air. It's a remarkable collection to watch as the series switches from full animation to a stylized versions similar to what UPI was doing to the limited animation which came to dominate and make possible television animation. There is even one of them which was designed for 3-D though this collection only has the very handsome 2-D version. 

Now I've always been a little off put by Casper's treacly personality in the past and at times it grates here still, but I found more of a classic cartoon subversive quality to many of these cartoons. I especially grew to look forward to the nigh inevitable reactions from adult humans and animals to the presence of a ghost with the classic "It's a G-g-g-Ghost!" stammer and a creative exit. My personal favorite is a cartoon where a scientist working a time machine is explaining his device, sees Casper and then erupts with fear transforming into a rocket and heading into the stratosphere. The the Popeye transformations when Spinach got onto the scene and into his system, these fearful changes were something to energize the cartoons. 

The cartoon series and the comic book were particularly interrelated with many of the cartoons adpated to comics later the reverse when Harvey took full control of the character and made the TV episodes. We get lots more Spooky and Wendy, both who had shown on the big screen and we get Nightmare's debut. These cartoons from the Shout Factory were quite entertaining at times, more than I expected. I got them because of the high quality of Shout Factory products and my general interest in the Fleisher Studios and Famous Studios cartoons. I liked them for their own merits quite a bit. 

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The Sunday Funnies - Krazy Kat!

I have known of Krazy Kat in some way or other pretty much my whole life. Early on  I was a fan and reader of books about comics, both comic books and comic strips, and I was lucky that my local library had a few tomes about these subjects. It was of course not the avalanche of information available today about vintage work in both areas, but there was some. And in nearly all of it which felt the need to touch on George Herriman's Krazy Kat there was praise and praise and nigh near worship. The book above I bought some years ago (almost certainly from a discount table of some kind) and set it aside tor read later. I've at long last picked it up and given it a thorough going over. The essay which starts it off is by Gilbert Seldes from his 1924 The Seven Lively Arts, and it unabashedly elevates the Herriman strip into the realm of art at a time when such considerations were markedly rare. 

For me, I found I really liked the artwork by George Herriman, a scratchy minimal cartooning that reminded me of Bobby London's Dirty Duck (of course I have it backwards). But the stories often were impervious to my understanding. I just didn't "grok" what Herriman was trying to say, though I found the fashion in which he packaged his comments appealing. So for most of my life Krazy Kat has been an enigma. 

And I wish I could say that has changed with my seasoning over the decades. I "get it" more than I did way back when, but still there's something about the strip which eludes me. The complex relationship between Krazy and Ignatz and Pupp is puzzling. I get that Krazy loves Ignatz who might or might not love Krazy and that Pupp loves Krazy too, and I get that none of them seem to know how to express those feelings. Is that all there is? Is that enough? It might be. 

But I do know that as puzzling as the message might be, I do very much love looking at those grand pages depicting Coconino County, a land of imagination that twists and turns and flying bricks with every glance. Is that the point? Is that enough? It might be. 

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The Toon Treasury Of Classic Children's Comics!

While The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics is divided into five categories ranging from "Funny Animals" to "Fantasyland", the real categories in this book according to editors Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly really fall between four artists -- Sheldon Mayer, Walt Kelly, John Stanley and Carl Barks. The editors admit as much and work from these giants of comic art dominate this collection regardless of the category a story might fall into. 

Chapter One is titled "Hey, Kids!" and celebrates such titles as Sheldon Mayer's Sugar and Spike (three stories) and Scribbly (one lengthy sequence of one-pagers), as well as two stories featuring Little Lulu by John Stanley. Dennis the Menace makes two appearances in this section and talents such as Jules Feiffer and Harvey Kurtzman are represented by Clifford and Egghead Doodle respectively. We are also treated to a story of Intellectual Amos by Andre LeBlanc from the pages of The Spirit sections. 

Chapter Two is dubbed "Funny Animals" and leading the way is Walt Kelly with a few "Uncle Wiggly" pages, a skewed fairy tale titled "Hickory and Dickory  Help the Easter Bunny", as well as an early Pogo story from Animal Comics. Mayer returns with a funny Three Mousketeers story and we get three Fox and Crow stories by Jim Davis. Donald Duck by Carl Barks is on hand alongside John Stanley's "Jigger". Throw in a Nutsy Squirrel and you have quite a bevy of beasts. 

Chapter Three titled "Fantasyland" delivers the goods as might be suspected. Lots more Walt Kelly with stories (four to be exact) from Fairy Tale Parade and a new name George Carlson shows up with some offbeat fairytale variations. John Stanley returns as does Little Lulu with two offerings. We get a story by Popeye animator Dan Gordon featuring a prototype of Droopy and MAD man Dave Berg is represented with two stories adapted out of Alice in Wonderland. Add in a little Supermouse by Milt Stein and it's a festive section indeed. 

Chapter Four is called "Storytime" and seems to be a section in which some oddball stuff finds inclusion such as more Pogo, more Intellectual Amos, and even a C.C. Beck story starring "The Big Red Cheese" himself  titled "In the Land of Surrealism". The latter is a delight. But the highlights of this section are by Carl Barks who has two Duck stories, one featuring Donald battling bees and the other with Uncle Scrooge and the boys venturing to the distant paradise of Tralla La -- one of comic's great classics tales. 

Chapter Five wraps it all up with under the heading "Weird and Wacky" giving the editors free reign. Such things as three Burp the Twerp one-pagers by Jack Cole, four Hey Look! one-pagers by Harvey Kurtzman, alongside  a J. Rufus Lion story by Mayer and a Patsy Pancake yarn by Milt Gross. Dr. Seuss offers up the peculiar classic "Gerald McBoing Boing" and Dick Briefer's Frankenstein plays music. John Stanley's Melvin the Monster tries to catch a mouse and it doesn't go well. The highlight though of this section are several pages of "Foolish Faces" as well a complete Powerhouse Pepper story by Basil Wolverton. 

The main significant  difference between this 2009 collection and the exceedingly similar Yoe Book collection from 2011 I examined last weekend, is that the latter was more interested in a diverse range of examples from the public domain to showcase what had existed in kids comics. This collection was more about the pure quality of the stories and sacrificing some variety. There's not much to criticize about either collection though if you have any fancy at all for light-hearted comic book tales. 

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The Harvey Girls!

 Comics have largely been considered a boy's hobby. But that's just because of the domination of superheroes in the medium for much of the Silver Age and beyond. Before that and even during there were comics starring girls and comics built just for girls. Not just the romance stuff, but books for even younger girls such as Harvey's line-up of Little Audrey, Little Dot and Little Lotta. 

Little Audrey was invented because Famous Studios lost the rights to Little Lulu and still had some material for those cartoons. So they made up a little girl with a lot of imagination and a ton of spunk and launched her into cartoons and later comic books first at St. Johns and then of course at Harvey. I confess to not really having been that impressed by Audrey over the years as her gimmick was more her audacious personality and not as visual a gag like Dot's. But one distinction Little Audrey had is that in the era of "Jim Crow" the title featured a young black character named Tiny. He wasn't done with any disparaging details or habits, he was just one of the kids and as such downright rare if not unique in his time. 

Little Dot was my favorite of the trio. Her fascination with finding and making dots was spectacularly visual and made for some of Harvey's funniest covers. Apparently Dot wasn't always so little, beginning life as a somewhat more  human proportioned character in the back pages of Sad Sack. When Harvey went prowling for new kid's characters, they took her and squeezed down to classic Harvey kid proportions and sent her into her lifetime of obsessive compulsion compulsion when it came to dots. One of the funniest renderings of Dot is this one by Mitch O'Connell of her all filled out for an early Comic Book Artist magazine from Twomorrows featuring a close look at Harvey Comics. (See below)

Little Lotta is a comic book which could not and would not be published today. Having a fat character who is defined by that very aspect would be considered far too politically incorrect for modern editors. Each panel of every story might be interpreted by some do-gooder as a "micro-aggression" (among the stupider modern concepts of a bewildered society). The fact that Lotta's problems with food were offset by her downright superpower of immense strength would have not been seen as a mitigation. 

Harvey Comics Classics Volume Five The Harvey Girls reveals that the editors and creators saw something in all these little girl characters that braced the imaginations of kids all over. Each of them were powerful in their own way, and not victims in any sense. In a world which catered to men in terms of authority and power seeing such stories in which girls mostly won the day with their wits, dedication, and power must have been brilliant to behold. 

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Baby Huey The Baby Giant!

I have to admit right up front that I am not much of a Baby Huey fan. I've always found the character unattractive and limited in terms of the comedy. The doofus-who-doesn't-know-his-own-strength is a but one-note for me. That said there's still some fine artistic craftsmanship to found in these pages for characters such as Herman, Katnip and Buzzy the Crow who are more directly taken from the Paramount stable. 

In point of fact I guess no single comic was more directly drawn (literally and figuratively) than was Baby Huey since Paramount animation talents were directly enlisted to illustrate the earliest misadventures of the world's biggest, strongest and dopiest duck. Apparently Baby Huey was dreamed up by an animator for the Famous Studios but before the cartoon itself could materialize debuted in the comics. Such was the synthesis of the two mediums at the time. 

I confess one of the things that annoys me about Huey is the diaper. He is so clearly wearing a diaper and it's such a voluminous bit of apparel that I cannot stop thinking about it. It distracts me from the narratives they try to weave around him. It's a symbol of his unshaking innocence I know, but it's also a symbol of incapacity and helplessness and I don't like my protagonists to be helpless. Down and out from time to time for certain, on the ropes once in a while for sure, but not perpetually helpless. And I know Huey with his immense strength is not helpless but he presents as if he were all the time. (And don't bring up that Hot Stuff wears a diaper too and I like him a lot...I'm not consistent on this point.)

Harvey Comics Classics Volume Four Baby Huey the Giant Baby is a bargain for so much diverting comics material. Still and all these were some funny tales, and in black and white the diaper doesn't bother me as much. 

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Hot Stuff The Little Devil!

I'd love to have been in the meeting in which Hot Stuff was first proposed to the folks at Harvey as an ongoing children's character. He's a devil with horns and a pointed tail and he carries a pitchfork. That's the kind of demonic satanic image we want to mass produce and send out to the newsstands across America. That should go over with little or no fuss. Oddly that seems to have been the case. Maybe it's because of the ground plowed by Casper as a supernatural character proper for kids or maybe Hot Stuff is just so dang cute that people overlook his demonic details. The diaper is a weird touch too. 

(1957)

Hot Stuff's gimmick of setting fire to things around him, often without any conscious decision to do so is pretty visual. It was much like Casper's constant walking into and through solid objects. Both characters don't fit into the natural world, nor do we expect them to do so. Whereas Casper is always nice and even downright a milquetoast of a character, Hot Stuff as we'd expect is a bit more inclined to lose his cool. Casper is white, the absence of color and Hot Stuff is bright brilliant red. 

(1960)

Harvey Comics Classics Volume Three Hot Stuff the Little Devil gives the reader another heaping of delightful Hot Stuff stories. The artist I most associate with Hot Stuff is Howie Post who brought a real flair to the standard Warren Kremer template for the broader Harveyverse. Hot Stuff never had the avalanche of titles that Casper and Richie Rich had, but he was without doubt a successful character for many years.

(This series not included -- just wanted to share an image.)

It should be noted that Stumbo the Giant is featured somewhat in this compendium also since he spent most of time as a co-feature in the Hot Stuff miniverse which was somewhat isolated from the larger Harveyverse.  

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Richie Rich The Poor Little Rich Boy!

I don't know for certain which comics character had more different titles dedicated to them (Superman, Batman, Archie) but certainly Richie Rich from Harvey Comics must be high on that list somewhere. The Poor Little Rich Boy began his career as a back up feature in Little Dot #1 and slowly succeeded in the shadows of the back-ups until getting his first titled try-out in Harvey Hits. Soon he had his own title and later still millions and billions and zillions more. 

(Richie's First Cover Appearance)

How this Little Lord Fauntleroy wannabe captured the imagination is difficult to explain for me. He's such a wimpy looking fellow, but the fact he has access to unlimited wealth and the fantastic and fantasy lifestyle that allowed must be it. He's a rich guy who doesn't forget his friends, making him a nice guy despite his wealth. He loyal, brave and honest -- a true blue friend. He's one of the good guys and at one point had well over thirty different comics with his name somewhere in the title on sale in a single month according to one source. I can only personally validate eighteen. 

(Debut Richie Rich 1960)

Harvey Comics Classics Volume Two Richie Rich The Poor Little Rich Boy offers up nearly five hundred page of comics, a delightful bounty of Richie stories. It's just not the early stories which celebrated the ornate ways his money allowed him to live, but the later stuff which put Richie into more adventurous modes. Those are my favorites stories with Richie and his butler Cadbury as detectives or spies or even superheroes trying to save the city or the world from some dastardly villain. It's odd to realize how successful (to my eyes at least) that blend of light Harvey fantasy and some mild suspense worked. 

(Not in this collection of course -- my favorite Ernie Colon image.)

One thing to note is that one artist closely associated with Richie Rich was Ernie Colon and this volume offers up a small interview with the talented artist. He was "lost" in the vast ocean of Harvey for many years but really made his mark among fans such as myself with his work on Grim Ghost and Amethyst Princess of Gemworld in later years. 

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