When it comes to Thanksgiving in comics, every now and then (...perhaps even more often than not) the turkey comes out on top. ...Usually after some fierce battle (with or without wits) or an intrusive mitigating circumstance.
But here, in FELIX THE CAT #37 (Toby Press, Cover Date: January 15, 1953 - corresponding to Thanksgiving 1952... 70 years ago!), we find a pair of turkeys getting a more passive break courtesy of Felix himself!
Felix uses a passing sawfish to cut firewood... (Click to Enlarge)
Hopefully, there are no local axe-emporiums running pre-Black-Friday sales this year! ..."Axes R Us", anyone?
Sequence is from a Felix newspaper strip continuity by Otto Messmer that is reprinted in FELIX THE CAT #37. HAPPY THANKSGIVING, ALL!
2 comments:
Somehow you managed to get all the way through this post without bringing up the Legendary Super-Pickax! Not that the local Thanksgiving hosts would be likely to choose a pickax to behead a turkey, but when the sole axe of the neighborhood has been spirited away by Felix....
It strikes me as very dark to have the turkeys making casual conversation about the axe with respect to their future. Or rather, their lack of future with respect to the axe. Somehow that comment passing as comedy feels darker to me than the usual turkey-fighting-off-the-axe-wielder gag stories. Though those stories don't work well as comedy for me in any case. I who am the great Crafter and Utilizer of Holiday-based Story Lists in my annual re-reads have no Thanksgiving comic book stories that I care to re-read. But I do have a couple of T'g picture books to re-read: Hudson Talbott's We're Back! (a classic, not to be judged by the movie!) and Marjory Wunsch's Spaceship Number Four, which I can imagine as a Duck story starring April/May/June and Daisy's cat in the Dutch Katrien comics, Dinkie.
Elaine:
One would hope that the “Legendary Super-Pickax” would SO fail to live up to its (uninspired – but great for riffing on) name that IT would break upon contact with a turkey’s neck! Thus, sparing the turkey while adding to the pantheon of “Legendary Super-Pickax” gags that have grown from that woefully mishandled (dialogue-wise) story.
Hmmm… Fatalistic Thanksgiving turkeys *would* be a more mature throwaway gag than one might expect, though this was from Messmer’s Felix newspaper strip of the 1930s, and we found plenty of that in then-contemporary Floyd Gottfredson, and still more in then-contemporary E.C. Segar, so it falls within the realm of “understandable”.
To digress… Averi had a Thanksgiving kindergarten project where she was supposed to “disguise a (drawing of a) turkey” in different outfits and accessories, which she would add to the drawing so the turkey could better hide.
On hiding a turkey, I brought up the cartoon “Tom Turk and Daffy”, where Daffy has to hide a panicky turkey (inflicting a healthy doses of pain and suffering in the process) from Pilgrim hunter Porky Pig. I’m trying to work some of these classic things into her usual mix of Paw Patrol and many other CGI-animated imitators of characters with annoyingly cute voices who team-up to protect or rescue someone or something – doing so with many different custom vehicles (…Sold separately). This seemed an ideal opportunity.
Playing THIS DVD for her, she enjoyed “Tom Turk and Daffy”, “Mouse Menace” (I skipped “Wagon Heels” for the time being – she also asked for “Mouse Menace” TWICE), and she had just begun laughing at “One Meat Brawl” before something interrupted us, and we never quite got back to it – but will do so soon enough.
One thing I initially thought odd (but later figured out why) was that Averi didn’t understand the concept of hunting. I explained to her that “…a long, long time ago, before supermarkets, this is how people had to get their food”. She thought about it and said something like “It’s better now!”, to which I quickly agreed.
Now, I’m not, nor will ever be, a hunter… but I was well aware of it at kindergarten age – and it made for some of the best classic-era cartoons of all time. But I soon realized that the concept was alien to Averi precisely BECAUSE of all those “CGI-animated imitators of characters with annoyingly cute voices who team-up to protect or rescue someone or something – doing so with many different custom vehicles (…Sold separately).” Her entertainment world is so “narrow and sanitized” that she asks me lots of questions about the older cartoons – which I’m happy to answer, in an age-appropriate manner, of course.
Averi also DOESN’T LAUGH at any of those “pro-social, moralizing and merchandising fests”, but never fails to laugh heartily out-loud at The Pink Panther, The Road Runner, and now Porky Pig whenever she asks me for them. My aim is to do more and more of that, and also with Cici when the proper time comes for her.
Finally, to she who is “The Great Crafter and Utilizer of Holiday-based Story Lists” (…and aren’t we glad of it!), there is always THIS ONE to add to your empty Thanksgiving List Cupboard… A mild stereotype warning notwithstanding. Being one of the original “Grandma Millie-given comics” of 1959-1960, this may very well be the FIRST Thanksgiving comic I’d ever seen!
Happy Thanksgiving!
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