As you might know, Saturday is often a day reserved for reading comics!
But, Friday, May 24, 2019 was a PERFECT spring day, with a nice wafting breeze felt through the front bay window - at which I read NEW FUNNIES # 71 (Dell Comics, Cover Date: January, 1943 - the Christmas, 1942 issue)!
I had just received this comic the day before, and couldn't think of a better time or situation (the house was empty, quiet, and spring-breezy) to enjoy this bygone treasure!
Didn't matter that it was a CHRISTMAS ISSUE in May, I enjoyed it all the same!
BACK COVER: Say, aren't there supposed to be EIGHT reindeer? Oh, wait... The other four are off reading NEW FUNNIES! ...That must be it!
And I KNOW Santa is supposed to be "magical", but how is his arm and wrist able to SLIP BEHIND THE PRINTING on the Gift Card?
Then again, this wouldn't be the first feat of Christmas Magic he performed for an issue of NEW FUNNIES, would it?
You can read about that little bit of Christmas in summer HERE!
But, back to (AHEM!) The Issue At Hand...
Ya gotta love the "Little Andy" in the upper left corner... trying to call attention to the fact that A CANDLE IS SETTING THE LOGO ON FIRE!
Hopefully, the outcome would be no more serious than Raggedy Ann and her "two Andys" merely being COATED WITH CANDLE WAX (as was the "case-times-two" HERE)!
...After all, even though it's actually MAY, it's still "Christmas" - and nothing bad should ever happen on Christmas!
RIGHT?
RIGHT!
Especially something as BAD as me playing around with images like this!
Especially something as BAD as me playing around with images like this!
3 comments:
This issue fascinates me! I've never seen a New Funnies issue that has NO Woody Woodpecker on the cover, and instead has Andy Panda cavorting with Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Not only that, Felix the Cat is one of the featured characters! It's even missing that...uh...sidekick, that, uh...very annoying sidekick, who is perhaps one of the more obnoxious characters in all of fiction. Even HE is nowhere to be seen on this cover! I suppose it's too much to hope that he doesn't show up with Andy in the interior stories. At least, he's absent from the cover, and Andy is more worthily placed beside two literary icons. It looks like comic book readers in the 40's got their dime's worth for sure...hey, I would have paid TWO dimes!
Now, regarding the candle fiasco that is about to transpire and which "Corporate (?) Andy" is trying to warn everyone about. Just look at what the dripping candle wax has done to Raggedy Ann's expression. She has turned from benign to malevolent. Looks as though she is about to perform some unspeakable act of mayhem on her brother and her brother's namesake. What sort of a sequel would transpire out of the Joe-enhanced events on this cover? Stay tuned to this same station, folks, and maybe we'll learn more about the Night of the Candle-Waxed Rag Dolls!
Meanwhile, I'm still pondering the delights of a book filled with Andy Panda (please, please, sans sidekick!), Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, Felix the Cat, and the rest of the lineup seen on that remarkable cover from long-ago. What a fascinating blend--Walter Lantz, Otto Messmer (or should that be Pat Sullivan? or Joe Oriole?), and Johnny Gruelle. It's almost too many delights to contemplate. What would be even more amazing would be some sort of adventure, maybe even involving candle-wax, that all of these disparate characters could share together. If done right--it might have been one of the ultimate comics crossovers of all time. Ah, the endless speculations wrought through images from comic-boxing!
Scarecrow:
This issue fascinates me, too! And I’ve just read it from cover to cover!
No Woody Woodpecker inside either! This was apparently before the character caught-on enough to become a regular presence in comic books. Daffy Duck had a similar slighting in Dell’s LOONEY TUNES AND MERRIE MELODIES title.
The strange thing is that while the contemporary issues of WALT DISNEY’S COMICS AND STORIES were devoted to Disney characters, LOONEY TUNES AND MERRIE MELODIES to then-Leon Schlesinger and soon-to-be Warner Bros. characters (Leon’s name was on the front covers in faux-signature style – and he even APPEARED as a character in the second issue!), and ditto OUR GANG with MGM characters – later becoming TOM AND JERRY, NEW FUNNIES was not a magazine entirely devoted to Walter Lantz characters at its beginning.
Of the NINE stories in the issue discussed here, only THREE of them feature Lantz characters – Andy Panda (the putative “star” and lead feature), Oswald the Rabbit with his pal Toby the Bear, and Li’l Eight Ball who appeared in a very small number of Lantz cartoons.
Like Woody Woodpecker, “That very annoying sidekick, who is perhaps one of the more obnoxious characters in all of fiction” is also absent from the Andy Panda story – because he hadn’t been created yet.
I don’t have the issue (alas), but I estimate that he “burst onto the scene” in NEW FUNNIES # 79 (1943)! At least according to the Grand Comics Database entry for the issue! For what it’s worth, I LIKE Charlie Chicken – a LOT! He made those later Andy Panda stories fun! But, to each his own… especially when it… um, “tastes like chicken”!
I’ve probably been a student of the strange and mysterious ways of Western Publishing for nearly 40 years, but NO area of my research has yielded more outright surprises than the Walter Lantz comics!
Reading the more modern issues, you’d never imagine issues like this because, unlike the Disney stuff, they were never reprinted!
Sharing this issue with Andy and his Lantz friends were such wonderful fantasy tales as “The Brownies” by Justin Gruelle, “Mr. Twee Deedle” by Johnny and Justin Gruelle, “Billy and Bonny Bee” by Frank Thomas, and “Raggedy Ann and Andy” by Gaylord DuBois and the great George Kerr – tragically unknown today! A 3 page (!) TEXT story about a “Paper Doll Boy” and Otto Messmer FELIX newspaper strip continuity reprints close out the book, not unlike like the way Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse continuities were seen WDC&S!
Even the Andy Panda lead story falls into the fantasy realm, as he is a walking talking (sorta realistic) panda bear-playmate, in a world of realistic kids and adults! Eventually he becomes more recognizably “cartoony” and befriends… (Shudder for you!) Charlie!
GOOGLE SAYS I MUST BREAK THE COMMENT HERE! ...Charlie Chicken was never THIS annoying!
...Aaaaand, WE'RE BACK! THANKS, GOOGLE! Charlie would have let me get the whole comment in without breaking!
It was a long evolution that took NEW FUNNIES from this to the better known later issues drawn by John Carey, Jack Bradbury, Pete Alvarado, and Vivie Risto – with Woody, Andy and (Shudder for you, again!) Charlie, Oswald with Floyd and Lloyd, Homer Pigeon, and later Chilly Willy!
And there were some interesting artists like Dan Gormley, Dick Hall, Lloyd White, and even John Stanley who took the book in unexpected – and fun – directions, once it became an “actual Lantz comic!”
“Nuthead [sic] and Splinter” were both BOYS, a TIGER FAMILY repeatedly tries to eat Woody and the kids, Oswald ADOPTS Floyd and Lloyd, Homer Pigeon INTRODUCES Chilly Willy – and there were even about three issues where FULL CREDITS appeared – writer, penciler, inker! That NEVER happened before or since!
And, through it all… Charlie Chicken remains Andy Panda’s lovable obnoxious sidekick!
I had NOT realized, until you pointed it out, that my crudely-added “dripping candle wax effect” turned Raggedy Ann from cute to sinister! How about that!
…Now, If I could just gather an army of rag dolls, a huge supply of crudely-fashioned personality-altering blue candle wax, enslave them thusly, and loose them upon an unsuspecting world…
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