STANLEY STORIES

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After he left Little Lulu, John Stanley attempted to create several new comic-book series for his then-foundering publisher, Dell Comics.

His old alma mater, Western Publications, had split from being the packager of Dell's best-selling comic magazines. They formed Gold Key Comics, and swiftly went downhill (in terms of quality) and uphill (in terms of sales and success).

For reasons yet unknown, Stanley chose to leave Western and produce new material for the struggling, rebuilt-from-scratch Dell imprint.

Stripped of their long-running licensed titles and characters, the new Dell scrambled to get something distinctive on the highly competitive comic book market.

Dell's president, Helen Meyer, was apparently impressed by Stanley's talent. Less hooked was Dell's new comic book editor, veteran cartoonist L. B. Cole. Cole and Stanley apparently did not see eye to eye. I wish I knew more about their relationship; all I do know is that they rubbed one another the wrong way, and that Stanley was, apparently, unhappy with their working relationship.

After a long, nurturing relationship with Western's editor Oskar Lebeck, L. B. Cole must have seemed an ignoble replacement to Stanley. Cole's eccentric comic book work of the 1940s, mostly for skid-row publishers, showed a certain cracked flair.

Above is a typical 1940s cover design by L. B. Cole. His covers inevitably overpower the mediocre innards of these off-brand funny-books. It's too bad this penchant for the unusual didn't translate into an appreciation of Stanley as a person.

Though they locked horns, Cole did allow Stanley to experiment with the comics market. 1961 was a significant year for comics. It saw the full flowering of the return of the super-hero to the comics mainstream. This had been slowly building since 1956, but the arrival of Jack Kirby (and Stan Lee)'s The Fantastic Four, late in the year, sounded a clarion call for the caped crusader-type.

That said, the marketplace was still malleable enough. War comics still sold well, as did watered-down science-fiction, funny animal, teen humor, romance and licensed-property based projects. Anything had the potential to take off, given the faddish nature of the reading public--and of popular culture in general.

Stanley, via Dell, tried horror comics, beatnik humor, teen humor, and, most improbably, soap-opera. Though leavened with seemingly unavoidable humor, Linda Lark, Registered Nurse was not a genre spoof. Its uneasy mix of daytime-drama and mild comedy made for a fascinating debut issue.

The sensibility is not terribly removed from that of Kookie, Dunc 'n' Loo, or the forthcoming Thirteen Going on Eighteen. The characters' actions--and reactions--are unmistakably Stanley's work. However, the general tone is intended to be at least a bit more serious.

As with Kookie, Linda Lark appears to be a comic magazine written for a slightly older audience. The innuendos and banter between the love-hungry nurses of City Hospital--especially from the explicitly comedic tomboy figure, Charley Stahk--is, if anything, stronger and more intended to amuse. There's less melodrama in this issue. The one potentially dramatic incident--in which yacht-owning non-swimmer Dr. Mayne falls overboard--is immediately snuffed by Stanley's comedic tendencies.

The untitled, three-part story weaves a loose narrative that lets character eccentricities take center stage. As Stanley often does, this story starts in medias res, with Broadway starlet Joyce Wilton wreaking emotional havoc with her constant demands and her I-deserve-better attitude.

Joyce Wilton is a classic Stanley antagonist. Full of herself, and convinced of her entitlement to the best things life can offer, Joyce makes a challenging patient for Linda and the other medicos on call. As Linda finds herself torn between the affections of dashing Doctors Blasko and Mayne, her sidekick, Charley Stahk, acts as a Greek chorus.

This off-duty encounter of Charley and Linda has echoes of similar conversations between Little Lulu and her tomboyish BFF, Annie:

Their banter-filled chat concludes with a beautifully timed, door-slam punctuated exit by Charley, which shows Stanley's wit and precision at its best:

In a how-to lesson in comic comics timing, the first tier ends page 10. The reader must turn the page to get the next tier. That instance of three-dimensional physical change adds to the comedic, character-driven effect of the sequence. It's almost wrong to see these two tiers together like this... but there's no way to do a "page turn" on this blog.

None of this jaunty kibitzing relieves the stress brought on by Wilton's me-first method. Before she can deal with the romantic tension between Wilton and Dr. Blasko, Linda is whisked away to tropical climes by Dr. Mayne and his yacht. (He's the well-to-do doctor, you see, and Blasko is a poor, struggling type.)

Charley is a tough cookie; she arms herself against the world with a plethora of wise-cracks, most of them intended to rankle their recipient. Stanley throws us off-guard, on page 16, with what appears to be a heartfelt revelation from this font of comedic wisdom:

Gotcha! It's a remarkable moment of rug-tugging, and it succeeds because the statement of Charley's, in the last panel, is actually funny--and a little bittersweet.

As with Stanley's horror comics for Dell, the lack of oomph in the artwork somewhat dampens the overall impact. John Tartaglione appears to be artist. I don't know if Stanley wrote these serious comics in the same manner as he's known to have written Little Lulu and Nancy--with vivid, rough drawings and panel breakdowns, pretty much ready to go.

Some of the panels (as in the horror material) are very awkwardly composed; others have moments of surprising grace. The compositions don't read with the certainty of Stanley's humorous 1960s material. It's possible that the artist had greater leeway in building the panels with Stanley's non-cartoon humor efforts.

While the story meanders, with no event that comprises a main narrative focus, its loose threads are impressively gathered in the book's fourth quarter. Dr. Blasko's conscience-clearing explanation, at story's end, leads to a sublime final statement from Nurse Lark--itself seemingly the punchline around which the 26 pages were written:

A recipe for a throwaway genre comic becomes a sharp shuffle of characters, events and atmosphere in John Stanley's hands. As with its first issue, this second Linda Lark shows Stanley ready, willing and able to write comics for an older audience. He rolls his eyes at the plot cliches, right along with the reader, and creates several remarkable sequences of more mature comedic banter--something no other comics writer was doing in the early 1960s.

In, er, stark contrast to the first issue's Charley Stahk solo story, the issue's backup feature is the fascinatingly somber (and self-revealing) "Tramp Doctor." This story strips away the layers of gloss and sparkle that precede it, and leave the reader a bit stunned at the end of their reading experience.

Dr. McCutcheon, the titular figure, is a ship's surgeon with an overt fondness for the bottle. He is, to quote his bartender, "darn good... when you're off the booze," which is seldom. McCutcheon appears to have a drinking problem, which he manages with the rationale of an alcoholic. "I drank, yes," he says to the ship's captain, "but the cases I had to handle, I did... and I made sure I was sober."

Why does McCutcheon drink? It's got to be a good reason, and as he explains...

McCutcheon has tried the captain's patience once too often. He's kicked off the boat on Gorbu, "one of the smallest islands in the Fijis," again according to the well-informed barkeep. McCutcheon reveals a death wish as he toasts his new, unexpected destination:

As McCutcheon quickly learns, Gorbu is a dry island. In the two days he stays there, the good doctor struggles with symptoms of withdrawal, and faces a Vertigo-esque confrontation with the tragic episodes of his past. As in Vertigo, the whole episode is a set-up, meant by the ship's captain to shock the doc into renouncing the bottle--and dealing directly with his bottled-up grief and loss.

"Tramp Doctor" is a fascinatingly frank and casual account of an alcoholic's world. This subject matter would have been impossible in a Comics Code-approved magazine. Because Dell had always set itself above other comics publishers, and avoided the Code altogether, thanks to their ironclad distribution system, they could explore taboo themes. The irony of the situation? They almost never did.

Aside from Stanley's controversial horror comics, and this feature, Dell never pushed the envelope of their freedom. A series about an unrepentant alcoholic--or a character who drinks and is not a comic sot--would have otherwise been verboten at this time.

The Comics Code makes no reference to substance addiction as a no-no, but informs us that "(l)iquor and tobacco advertising is not acceptable." Social drinking was allowable, but serious boozing, except as a subject of comedic derision (the teetering, stuttering drunk) does not exist in comic books from 1955 to 1970.

One wonders if Stanley understood the freedom he had as a comics creator outside the stifling Code. Stanley's matter-of-fact, informed tone in "Tramp Doctor" is more shocking than anything E.C. Comics ever published. There is no strong moral against drink--just the alcoholic's self-pity and self-justifying attitude.

The character's relaxed fatalism is disarming--the last thing in the world we might expect from an early 1960s romance comic book, and a stark window into the self-esteem of the story's creator, himself an alcoholic. Stanley drank (and chain-smoked) to hold chronic depression at bay. So did many other average Americans in those Space Age days before Prozac and depression therapy.

Stanley takes the adage "write what you know" to remarkable lengths in "Tramp Doctor." Nowhere else in his published work does so much of his daily struggle come through. After the souffle of adult comedy and melodrama in the "Linda Lark" story--an example of the entertainer's face Stanley held up to the world in his work--the unapologetic, non-moral tone of "Tramp Doctor" is bracing and deeply moving.

The hint of McCutcheon's salvation, at story's end, rings rather false, even to McCutcheon:

As future "Tramp Doctor" episodes confirm, McCutcheon's struggle with the bottle remains front-and-center in his drifting, aimless life. The feature continued for the book's lifespan, as it changed title, twice more, and lasted into 1963. When the series ended, so did this uncharacteristic (if unselfconscious) slice of four-color confessional.

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I'm trying something new today. I've made a PDF file of the entire issue of this comic magazine. Rather than post tedious-to-click-through scans here, why not have the whole funnybook in an easy-to-read form? Voila. Click HERE (or HERE, if you dislike Rapidshare) to download a complete PDF file of this comic book.

One of the small rewards of Dell Comics scholarship is in spotting the myriad in-jokes and self-references in which the creators indulged themselves.

The writers and artists of Oskar Lebeck's Western Publishing staff delighted in putting one another's names--and caricatures--all over their comic-book stories.

These references, given the general lack of documentation available at present, have become the only way we have to determine who's who in the Western world.

Michael Barrier has been exploring this phenomenon in his on-going research for an upcoming book on Lebeck and his genial comics empire--a book I can't wait to read.

In this ongoing post, he discusses and notes incidents of in-jokes in the Lebeck-edited comics--of which Walter Lantz New Funnies was a prominent monthly. He mis-identified today's story as being from an early 1946 issue of the magazine. It's from the September, 1946 issue of New Funnies, which is late in the John Stanley-driven era of the series.

At this time, Stanley was well-connected with the Lantz characters. He particularly took a shine to the idiot-savant outsider, Woody Woodpecker. As I've noted before, the foundation for his greatest character--Tubby Tompkins in Little Lulu--was built in these earlier Woody stories.

By the time this story appeared, Stanley had written and drawn four Little Lulu one-shot comics, with a fifth to appear one month later. He hadn't yet clearly defined the personae of Lulu. Ironically, the 1946 Woody Woodpecker acts more like Tubby than the 1946 Tubby. By the end of the 1940s, Stanley had Tubby's rich, misguided-yet-sympathetic personality down in stone.

Back to the matter of in-house references: in the fourth post on this blog, I ran a 1947 "Woody" story with caricatures of John Stanley, Dan Noonan, and the pipe-smoking Mo (Moe) Gollub.

Dan Noonan is referenced by name in the fifth panel, and from this caricature, one can assume he had a weak jawline. I haven't seen any photographs of Noonan (yet), so this is my closest clue to how he looked.

Stanley and Walt Kelly dropped Noonan's name constantly in their mid-1940s comics. It's a funny, W. C. Fields-ish name, aside from the in-house joshing.

Stanley had caricatured Gollub about a year earlier, at the conclusion of the story featured today. Gollub is a cog in the slowly-creaking karma wheel of Woody's self-assured stumble dance through life.

The shared use of staff caricatures gives the 1940s Lebeck-edited comics a charming solidarity. It suggests a group of creators who enjoyed each other's company and talents. Walt Kelly may have brought this loving caricature tradition from the Walt Disney studios. A thousand volumes could be published of staff caricatures--some gentle, some malicious/libelous, but all in rowdy 1940s fun.

Like Carl Barks' 10-page "Donald Duck" stories, Stanley's "Woody" shorts often show him in an unusual job--private eye, fight trainer, fireman, or exterminator--in which he is apparently established. Despite his colossal self-regard, he is blind to the flaws in his cognitive biases, and gets led by the nose for our reading amusement.

Unlike Barks' duck, Stanley's woodpecker never senses his own shortcomings. He is not the type to lock himself in the hall closet to brood. A happy agent of chaos, he bounces off roadblocks, usually to his own detriment, and soldiers on.

POP CULTURE NOTE: This panel may seem a non sequitur to 2012 readers:

The Thurber-esque matron makes a reference to a well-loved movie role by light comedic/dramatic actor Don Ameche, as inventor Alexander Graham Bell:

Apparently, this 1938 movie made quite an impact on American pop-culture. This gag was used many times on radio comedies, and probably in other comic strips. To this day, "Don Ameche" remains a slang term for the telephone.

Although Ameche appeared in nearly 100 movies and TV shows, including 1985's Cocoon and the zero-budget screwball gem It's In The Bag (1945), his seminal early role rang a bell that resounded for the rest of his life--and gave John Stanley a charming piece of character comedy for this story. Woody's assignation of the role of Eli Whitney to Ameche salvages an otherwise-routine popcult joke.

The puffy Thurber-ish human figures in Stanley's 1946 stories are another tell of his hand as creator. Although he didn't ordinarily draw such figures, the stories he scripted for New Funnies are full of these lumpen masses. This may actually be a side-effect of his having to imitate Marge Buell's cartoon style for the early Little Lulu one-shots.

This nine-page story in posted in PDF form for reading (HERE) or downloading (HERE.) Enjoy!

In our ongoing attempt to make Election Day more enjoyable, we turn to the wisdom and resourcefulness of that great American, Tubby Tompkins.

As you go to the voting booth (or mail your ballot), take a moment to enjoy this delightful 1950 story by John Stanley and Irving Tripp.

Stanley rarely trafficked in overt political commentary. In this story, he suggests that the behavior of adult men, vying for powerful positions and public offices, aren't too far removed, in their behavior, from children.

Some behaviors learned on the playground continue to influence adults in the big, bad "real world." This season's political circus is evident--and sufficient-- proof of this theory. Enjoy!

No post-story commentary today... just a friendly reminder to cast your ballot!

I'm just coming off a long, complex coloring project for another artist-writer's graphic novel. This hasn't given me much time to think about ol' Stanley Stories. In my absence, the blog continues to thrive, with a strong daily readership.

With almost 250 posts on this blog, there's already plenty to read, but here's something old, something new...

1946/7 saw the end of John Stanley's work on the New Funnies title. Having begun his 15-year association with Marge's Little Lulu by then, Stanley had also honed his storytelling and humor skills. There was still much refinement to do, as today's stories show in abundance.

Lulu changed Stanley--arguably for the better, but at a price. Certain creative and comedic tendencies, tamped down by the requirements of the Lulu-verse, would disappear entirely from his work, not to resurface until the early 1960s.

Thus, most of John Stanley's work of the 1950s is compromised in some way--despite its high quality. The energy of "Little Lulu" is strait-jacketed, when compared to his work before and after the series. It suits the characters and material beautifully, but it does not appear to have been Stanley's natural inclination as a humorist and narratist.

As the 1950s Little Lulu material is Stanley's most successful and well-loved work, it creates a wide dichotomy. Is Stanley better when he is more restrained? Or is the pell-mell, impulsive Stanley of the work outside Lulu preferable? The latter includes his remarkable run on the 1960s title Thirteen Going on Eighteen, which many regard as Stanley's finest achievement in comics.

Truly a question for the ages (for the 130 of us out there who care about such things)...

Today's offerings are far more modest than either Lulu or Thirteen. They are lesser pieces from the developmental years of a creative career. They're also instantly recognizable as the work of the man who created those two bipolar masterworks.

The first story is part of a half-assed attempt to inject educational material into the "Andy Panda" feature. For four installments in '46, the feature was called "... and the Magic Library," which certainly must have been the idea of someone else in Oskar Lebeck's talent pool.

Similar to Little Lulu's ritual fairy-tales, the "Magic Library" stories open with a vaudeville-like narrative frame before getting down to business. Thank heavens Stanley didn't submit to the namby-pamby tendencies this mini-series might suggest... it's one thing to leap into an encyclopedia and have a vigorous adventure. It's another to make that "educational" section rowdy and entertaining.

Thus, no actual enriching information is conveyed to the reader. This, perhaps, is why the feature perished so quickly.

Here's the first part of today's double-feature...

Before any discussion of this story, I want to ponder the events of the story's third page. It contains an exquisite outbreak of emotional violence that is among Stanley's most jarring moments. Andy has a right to be annoyed by Charlie's noisome outbursts with toy and trombone. The page's final tier, with Andy's flip from psychotic ranter to Chipper Self, Usual is like a slap in the face.

This one-time outburst seems to have been an over-expressed humorous idea. Its intensity is as freakish as the violent actions of Mr. Grump in the unforgettable "Tubby" story "Hide and Seek" (Little Lulu 79). It's not alone in John Stanley's work. Overly intense expressions of violent intent, usually short and percussive, are one of the characteristics of his writing, throughout his comics career.

As that outburst subsides, the story gets to its main conceit. Andy and Charlie's fantasy of adventure and tourism in Australia is almost instantly deflated by the intrusion of their personalities. In this remarkably non-educational story, our heroes are rendered unconscious en route; one of them is too weak to walk when they arrive, and both run afoul of meat-eating marsupials.

According to Wikipedia, "Different species of kangaroos have different diets, although all are strict herbivores." Stanley either didn't know that fact, or chose to ignore it in order to create a conflict situation.

Seen through the naïve lens of the child-like Andy and Charlie, such a notion seems charmingly apt. Their existential non-adventure reads like a light version of one of Lulu's made-up fairy tales.

It also has much in common with some of the stories Carl Barks created, across the country, at the same time. In some of these Barks stories, Donald Duck is similarly non-heroic, more a puppet of fate than a determinist adventurer. And, as with Stanley, this is a trait seen in Barks' stories of the 1940s and 1960s, but seldom in the 1950s (which was also, arguably, Barks' most important and popular decade as a comics creator).

Barks returns to this notion that Donald is a powerless plaything in his 1960s ten-page stories. Find a copy of The Comics Journal 140, from 1991, to read my thoughts on these late Barks short stories.

Woody Woodpecker, in Stanley's hands, also has ties to Barks' Donald. Like the Duck, he is a frustrated careerist, forever in search of a line of work at which he can succeed. Woody lacks the suburban respectability of Barks' duck. He's a cigar-smoking, seedy loner who lives in cheap boarding houses and is usually down-and-out.

Given Woody's inherent noir tendencies, the role of private detective seems a natural for him. But, in John Stanley's world, the more determination put into an event, the less likely it is to succeed. Philip Marlowe never had the deck stacked against him like the bird does in this bittersweet episode...

There is some of Tubby's future behavior in PI Woody, but the woodpecker is clearly an adult, and highly suspect at that.

The story is, for Stanley, rather poorly conceived. It supports his statement that he made up his stories as he went along:

...I just hoped for the best, that's all. I never gave too much thought to anything in stories. I just wrote the stories; that's it.

This statement, so self-effacing as to seem disingenuous, must be taken with some extra NaCl. While improvisation and whim clearly shaped much of Stanley's work, there is often a complexity to his overall story arcs that suggests some big-picture thought.

This story lacks a central reason for why its events happen. Why does the nameless rich man hire Woody to watch his young daughter? No possible danger, such as kidnapping, is mentioned--usually the first thing a client puts on the table in such a genre story.

Woody is downtrodden, and often seems to feel the world is out to get him. Here, everyone's role is to thwart and denigrate him. His wealthy client is bafflingly vague about why he has hired Woody; beat cop Clancy has the bird pegged as a stalker/child molester; the girl he's hired to protect does him physical harm. His client delivers the final, crushing blow to the bird's sleuthing career.

Is this just sloppy writing? Stanley sometimes coasted on his sheer wit, while burning through pages without any real gain. Here, his dialogue is razor-sharp and funny, but the story itself is a meandering mess.

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery," as James Joyce, a person you never thought you'd see quoted here, once said. Indeed, we can learn as much from John Stanley's failures as his successes. It's instructive to see such stories, in which the process of Stanley's work is laid bare by its shoddy narrative.

The story's layouts are unusually awkward, as well. This panel ignores the rule of thirds with a vengeance:

Several other panels in the story are crudely designed. The lack of TLC here suggests either indifference to the work or an almost-blown deadline. The effect is like seeing the tip of a boom mike in a movie, or camera failure during a live TV broadcast. Seeing the flaws in a usually seamless medium can, indeed, be educational. It's a reminder of how crucial those seams are to mass-media communication.

NOTE: As with some recent posts, the stories referred to in this piece are available for download or online reading HERE or HERE. Please read the comics material before reading the following text, as it's laced with spoilers. They're not great scans, and not my own, but they're adequate for reading until something better comes along.

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Drawn + Quarterly's John Stanley Library--and its intended complete reprinting of the Thirteen Going on Eighteen series--seems to be on hiatus. Given the iffy nature of the traditional book market, which will never die but is in a state of transition, D+Q's pause is entirely understandable.

Their first volume of Thirteen, which I reviewed here, ends just as the series enters its finest period.

As with all Stanley's work, even the lesser material yields something of value. Thirteen takes its sweet time getting into high gear. It's unthinkable of a mainstream comics creator in 2012 (outside of the graphic novel arena) to dawdle for two or three years and casually but diligently get his/her act together. Once Stanley hits the sweet spot in Thirteen--around issue seven--the payoff is phenomenal.

Therefore, I feel comfortable posting material from this series here. If D+Q continues their project, you'll enjoy reading much, much better scans of these stories, in a more pleasing and permanent form. These scans, bless their hearts, are like watching a bad print of a public domain movie. For this, I apologize.

John Stanley is comfortably at the helm of this series with its tenth issue. As was his standard, and preference, he had spent nearly two years getting familiar with the cast of characters, their relationships, and the world around them. The eighth issue to feature his cartooning, he is equally settled in as artist and writer.

This, and the following five or six issues of the title, are among comics' finest, most acute and intuitive narratives about adolescence. They show us two sides of the Stanley coin: showboating, Nat Hiken-esque situation comedy, glib, brassy and impeccably timed, and a startlingly frank, vivid look at the fragile, ever-changing emotional word of a teenage girl.

In theory, these elements are at complete odds. One cannot sensitively explore the inner world of a character's quirks, phobias, cognitive biases and fears while also playing them for boffo laffs. Yet that is what John Stanley achieves with the middle-period run of TGOE (a finger-saving acronym, if you don't object).

The character of Val stands with Little Lulu's Tubby Tompkins as Stanley's most fully realized figure. Both characters seem to have a life outside of the banners, balloons and boxes of their comic book world. Both are fearless in their self-determination, warriors of status, dignity and respect, and both are oblivious to how the rest of the world sees them.

Tub and Val are both empowered and helpless because of their status. Tubby is a single-digit kid, under the thumb of a large chain of adult command--from his parents to McNabbem, the truant officer.Yet he figures prominently in the playground politics of his neighborhood. Whether he's admired or detested, Tub gets a reaction from his peers.

Val's mother is seen in a few early stories, and is a benign, indulgent presence. She soon vanishes from the series. Val's father is never seen, and I don't believe he's even mentioned in passing.

Val's older sister, Evie, assumes the parental authority role as the series matures. She also functions as the Lulu to Val's Tubby. She is the voice of reason, the mirror that quietly reflects a truth, over and over, despite Val's refusal to see it.

This is the quintessential John Stanley character relationship. Each of Stanley's significant comics series contains this archetypal duo. In some cases, the "Tubby" of the pair is less excitable, and the "Lulu" a little looser. But the dynamic is at the core of Stanley's interest as a writer and storyteller.

Evie figures prominently in the first two chapters of this loose novella, "Zombie in the Family" and "Little Match Girl." In these two pieces, we learn a lot about how the two sisters function--and dysfunction. Evie has a saint's patience in enduring the constant mood-swings of hormone-crazed, status-seeking, boy-obsessed Val.

Presumably, Evie has been through this phase herself, and knows what to expect. She navigates Val's tantrums, over-reactions and anxiety attacks with understanding and calm. Evie is what we all hope our parental figures are like, as we reach maturity. Alas, the trial of raising a teenager is enough to test anyone's sanity, and our progenitors don't always react with the cucumber cool and assurance that Evie accords Val.

We, the readers, have the joy of watching Val flail through her emotional roller-coaster ride. We cringe at the things that hit too close to home, and laugh at the extremes which Stanley so keenly plays for high-gloss laughs.

"Zombie in the Family" also features Judy, Val's extra voice of reason figure. Judy is of equal status to Val--they're both wrapped up in the same world of emotion, status and hormones. Like Val, Judy is on the edge of being an outsider. Both girls strive mightily to play the teenager game; both are too strong-willed and stubborn to do it with sincerity and full investment.

Val uses Judy to mimic her relationship with sister Evie. Val assumes that she's the smarter, more stable and more attractive of the two, and passes surprisingly harsh judgment on her BFF, as seen in this excerpt:

Judy has made a religion of dating the difficult, twerpy Wilbur--a fussy, lazy and utterly un-desirable soul who rates his pork-pie hat more highly than his girlfriend. Her union with Wilbur is a sham-relationship that exposes the world of teenage dating for a farce.

Val fares somewhat better in the teen world. At this point in the series, she still dates the handsome, affable and well-off Paul Vayne, while stuck in a continual flirt-cycle with the boy next door, Billy Wilkins.

Like Dobie Gillis and Zelda Gilroy, in Max Shulman's Stanley-esque sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Val and Billy are genetically destined to be together. Until the day they give into fate, they are content to play with each other's feelings in a way that invites mutually rebellious behavior.

Val's stock in trade is pushing people too far. Her relationships with Paul and Judy are in constant peril. In this issue's suite of stories, Val harangues Judy about not being attractive--a word repeated for Hiken-esque comedic impact--and bullies her into a horrid hairstyle experiment. Less enmeshed friendships would immediately end over such a brutal incident, but Val and Judy soldier on.

Val repeats a behavioral moment from earlier in the series, in which she finds humor in a tense, unhappy situation, blurts, and then realizes the error of her ways:

Informed that Val's beau, Paul Vayne, called while she was mutilating her BFF's hairstyle, Val over-reacts in a manner that Larry David might admire:

Stanley's in rare form as a comedian on this page. Val's distracted pause, and entreaty to Billy, have sharp timing--a rhythm that is handed down from creator to reader.

I've commented before on the relationship of Stanley's later work with that of the 1960s underground comix scene. It's hard to read this page without thinking of Gilbert Shelton, R. Crumb or Justin Green in their prime. Though Stanley had no access to the freedom of expression these younger artists enjoyed, he tapped into their desire to put more information about characters, relationships and outcomes on the comics page.

It fascinates me that, working alone, this melancholy alcoholic middle-aged man, creating comics meant for a young adult audience, hit on this same raw richness.

Val's conscience persists, and she snaps out of her zombie state to make amends with Judy. This sends her out into the snow (like rain, a poetic device in Stanley's world) and into the lives of a choice late incarnation of the author's Evil Rich characters:

Somewhat like the George Harrison episode in Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, an innocent protagonist wanders into the lives of complete strangers, living in a different world, makes a brief, lasting impression, and wanders off again.

As with Lester's movie, there's no narrative demand for this vignette, but the piece, as a whole, is richer for its inclusion. Stanley's sharply drawn characters barely escape caricature here, thanks to his skill as a writer of comedic dialogue, as seen here:

The issue's loose suite of stories never quite recovers from this fascinating bump in the road. But its inclusion at all is a thing of wonder. This is precisely the kind of off-topic material that would have gotten cut in most other mainstream comic books of the 1960s.

Despite Stanley's apparently unhappy relationship with editor L. B. Cole, he was allowed to do what he felt like. Whether this was borne of indifference or indulgence isn't known, but moments such as these help to distinguish Stanley's TGOE from all other teen humor comics, past and present.

Though the main story winds down, after this haunting incident, Stanley picks up the pace for two final, unrelated stories. A four-page Judy solo piece crams in a graphic novel's worth of intense physical action and social mayhem. Best to read "Disarmed" on its own frantic merits.

The grace note of TGOE was the ongoing theatre-of-cruelty called "Judy Junior." This existential inversion of the childhood world of Little Lulu is among Stanley's most acerbic, bracing work.

The essence of "Judy Junior" seems to be a message from creator to reader: "See? You survived the horrors of early childhood! Remember how horrible it was?"

Never has such a frightening pall been cast on the seemingly innocent pre-school "days of wonder." "Judy Junior" seems a sort of revenge on the constraints Stanley lived with during his work on Lulu. The brazen, self-righteous cruelty of Judy Junior towards the thin, timid Jimmy Fuzzi makes the worst of Tubby Tompkins' actions seem mild and, well, childish.

"A Clean Sweep" is an apparently self-prescribed cathartic for all the snow stories of Stanley's Little Lulu. In those Lulu stories, Stanley strongly delineated the playground jungle of boy-girl relationships--but with a restraint from their worst possible tendencies. Ultimately, the antics in LL are all good clean fun.

"Judy Junior" suggests Little Lulu as re-imagined by Herschell Gordon Lewis. While there is, of course, no blood or gore, the same threat of imminent harm hangs over these stories, as it does in Lewis' primitive, unsettling '60s horror flicks.

Just as there is no hope for most of HGL's unfortunate victim-protagonists, there is no hope for the happy childhood of Jimmy Fuzzi. Each day means another upending encounter with the apparently uncontrolled, unmonitored sadist who proclaims Fuzzi "my good friend." With friends like Judy Junior, enemies are a mere afterthought.

If this savaging of Lulu was unconscious, on Stanley's part, a sense of venom still pervades these pages.

An entire book of "Judy Junior" would be nearly unbearable. In four-page chunks, this series opens the cellar door to the darkest impulses of John Stanley's world. Bluntly stated, the weak will not survive. The best they can do is to curry favor with the strong, and cringe in anticipation of the next sh!tstorm. A veneer of clever dialogue and showy physical comedy does nothing to dispel this gloom.

How did 1960s readers shake off this comics voodoo? Yet apparently no one complained, and Stanley was never asked to stop "Judy Junior." For this we can be both grateful and worried. This blend of feelings, in reaction to Stanley's TGOE, is what distinguishes it from all other young adult humor comics. It provides us with a large, worrisome window into Stanley's psyche.

I hope that Drawn + Quarterly can continue their John Stanley Library in some form. These stories, with their dense, often difficult emotions and actions, have much to offer 21st century readers, as they blur the lines of what a "kid's comic" is supposed to be.

Happy 2013! To ring in the new year, I present the complete run of John Stanley's intense, unusual and highly personal "Tramp Doctor."

You may download a CBR file (which can be converted to an RAR file by just changing the file extension) HERE. This file includes a three-page piece on the series I've written.

It does not, by far, contain all my thoughts on "Tramp Doctor." I have more to say about this series -- and about all of John Stanley's work.

Truth told, I've been giving this stuff away for free since 2008. This is the year I will write a book on John Stanley, his life and his work.

Who will step forward and publish it?

I've tried to interest my agent in the project, but I think it falls outside of his perimeters. I've pitched the project to one major publisher, but not heard back from them. (The person I pitched it to is crazy-busy, and I understand that some things fall off his radar, but I hope to be able to discuss this project with him in this new year).

With the 250th post, I will end Stanley Stories the blog. It has been a pleasure to do this blog, and I'm grateful for all the great people I've met, and all the information I've found, as a result of this project. I'm at a crossroads in my life, where I can keep giving away my gifts, and suffer in poverty, or commit them to a more permanent form, in the guise of a book.

Comics scholarship, like creating comics at all, is not a path to fortune -- of this I am gravely aware. I would like to have something more solid to show for all the work and thought I've put into my in-depth study of the comics of John Stanley.

I'm more than ready for the task, and I feel such a book would add greatly to existing comics and popular culture scholarship. Publishers, you have a potentially great book here. Will you step up and publish it?

One of the key messages in John Stanley's world is this: the world is a scary place. Funny things may happen, triumphs may be scored, losses bettered, statuses and faces saved... but one never knows what's going to happen--or why.

This element, also familiar to readers of Carl Barks' comics, gives these so-called "kiddie comics" an edge seriously lacking in much of what passes for comics, period.

This message doesn't require the walking dead, heavy artillery, secret origins or super-powers... to experience the same, the reader only needs to open his or her front door, best foot forward, and step out into the world.

Culled from two issues of Walter Lantz New Funnies (113 and 120), this special "Scary World" edition of Stanley Stories features three stories, and is available as a .CBR file >>>HERE.<<< If you're not hep to the CBR revolution, just rename the file as an .RAR extension, crack it open, and read that-a-way.

In mainstream comics of the 1940s, particularly those published after the war, this message is common-place. The war made the world a walking, talking mass of PTSD. Good Americans that we are, we shrugged our shoulders, pretended to laugh it off, and fixed ourselves another stiff drink.

What else could you do? We had the H-bomb, they had the A-bomb; food, clothing and housing shortages remained from the war. On the upside: the economy was good, and the American worker entered the cushiest, most carefree era of his/her existence. Life's little ups and downs could really frazzle a fella, if he stopped to think about it.

Nah--let's not, and say we did. And so the American populace soldiered on through the worst anxieties of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. But the naked nerve-endings of those suppressed fears spill out all over their mass media.

John Stanley was a popular architect of this tread lightly and look o'er ye shoulder school of thought. Over and over, a message comes through in his stories: ya just can't win. Though subdued (as were many of Stanley's more personal feelings) in the best-selling pages of Marge's Little Lulu, the message was still there, a couple of layers down. We are all Tubby, and our occasional victories are forever leavened by a dozen small defeats. Smile while you can, 'cos the West Side Gang is waitin' around the corner.

These three New Funnies stories explore a different slice of post-war anxiety pie. Please do download and read the stories before going much further, unless you're hooked on spoilers.

In our first (and gravest) piece, our barely-functioning woodpecker sits in the upholstered comfort of his home, reading a yet-unidentified story/poem, similar in title to one of Walt Whitman's ground-breaking poems, yet authored by "McAdam."

Woody is at his most affluent in this most heart-breaking story. He's the 1946 equivalent of a Trader Joe's shopper... living comfortably, yet slightly beyond his means and with a blind eye to the realities of the world outside his window.

His pickled onions, caviar and truffles packed in a bindlestiff, the bird takes a taxi to the city limits, convinced that romance, joy and freedom await him. He's immediately sized up, and robbed, by two members of Stanley's hobo army (seen in Little Lulu and other Stanley efforts of the era).

Tied to a tree, and penniless, Woody is rescued by a circus worker, who revives the bird's Technicolor dreams of "Adventure! Excitement!" He's put to work peeling spuds. While he whittles, he dreams:

After this comic-poignant page, he's put to work on-stage as the passive assistant to a knife-thrower and a Native American archer. Then, after a stint (at gunpoint) inside the lion's cage, and an aerial voyage a la cannon, the bird again meets his tramp victimizers.

In anyone else's world, this would be the moment of victory. Woody gets back his stolen dough, but only for a few seconds. His final fate, at story's end, is one of the blackest moments in the q.v. of John Stanley.

How did 1946 kids, who inhaled such comic book stories, absorb these negative life-lessons? Or was this just "funny stuff" to them--that someone could be so stupid and ill-starred to lose his money, home and status? Perhaps, in affluent post-war America, such a fate was unthinkable to the enlarged, cushy middle class. There were people living outside the margins of society, making grass soup, if you will, in 1946, but they were far off-camera in the official family portrait of American life.

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Stanley's version of Andy Panda represents the more well-adjusted, socially connected and mild-mannered world of middle-class entitlement.

Andy and his bromance partner Charlie Chicken never seem to do without. They may tangle with gangsters, ghosts, mad scientists and homicidal maniacs, from time to time, but at the end of the day, the meat's on the table, there's a good book waiting by the big ol' overstuffed armchair, and there's a nice double-feature showing at the movie theatre right down the block.

Thus, Andy and Charlie are excellent foils for the unexpected shortages of The Good Life that seem to have plagued middle-class 1947 America. Much comedy is mined, in this New Funnies period, from food, housing and clothing shortages.

Stanley obviously saw great humor in this situation. Innocent foils, dreaming of a new suit, a warm apartment, or steak "with all the trimmin's" would find none of these creature comforts. A businessman set to make an important speech has only a gaudy Hawaiian shirt to wear; men grow elderly on waiting lists for a new sedan; an ambulance nervously delivers grade-D meat cuts to a frenzied, clawing public.

There are echoes of Milt Gross' Count Screwloose in such Stanley stories, but with a post-war edge. No longer is it an easy life in America. Butchers rent out their meat hooks for pay-by-the-hour hat and coat storage, and watch flies die of starvation on their dusty cutting blocks. The suffrage of the war still lingers to decade's end.

Andy and Charlie are driven to hunt for meat, beginning with a sublime moment:

Their hunting attempts result in the possible injury of a bridle horse, the annoyance of a bear, physical harm to Charlie and, finally, to a rabbit. Our heroes can't bring themselves to consume this accidentally-caught game, and rush it to a vet's operating room.

The rabbit lives, and, with promises to send the recovering bunny "fruit and flowers every day," the pair returns home to the likely dinner of many an average joe, 1947 model:

In an eerie parallel to the earlier "Woody" story, this final panel shows both resignation and contentment, as the protagonist fixes a meal that is far below their initial expectation.

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Even when there's a warm home to sleep in, and food on the table, Stanley's borrowed protagonists still face trauma every time they leave their homes. In this same issue of New Funnies, housemates Oswald Rabbit and Toby Bear fall afoul of a publicity agent's wet dream.

As often happens to Stanley's Oswald and Toby, the threat is sexual in nature. Toby's obsession with wispy, anemic Hollywood starlet Sally Simper causes social embarassment--and aggressive female response--for the easy-going hare.

In a series of events that recalls the screwball build-ups of Preston Sturges, asexual Oswald, via a series of insinuating newspaper articles, becomes the object of lust for crazed bobby-soxers, while Toby passively tries to get in on the action:

In Sturges' fashion, every effort expended by Oswald to right the misunderstanding worsens the situation. In disguise as a rheumatic oldster, Oswald becomes the sexual prey of the blue-haired set:

The story ends with the hero's retreat to a dark, dusty place, in the hope that the episode will just fizzle out.

Toby brings the topic of food into the story's last panel... thank you, Toby, for doing so. Now all three stories are tied in a Gordian knot of post-war anxiety. That knot would eventually be cut in the youth revolution of the 1960s, in which now-adult age former New Funnies readers would break the veil of anxiety with a libertine pursuit of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

With such profound messages of despair and tension in their childhood mass-media, is it any wonder that these grown readers would choose any avenue of escape? I don't know whether to curse John Stanley or thank him. He, and many other producers of post-was mass media, laid the path brick by brick, panel by panel, page by page.

My friend and colleague Thad Komorowski has big news that I eagerly share here: Sick Little Monkeys, his book on the rise and fall of John Kricfalusi, Ren & Stimpy and Spumco Animation is now available. Full disclosure: I was the book's editor, and I also colored and co-designed the cover with Thad.

That said, it's his work all the way, and as I edited the text, I was fascinated with this darkly humorous, sometimes painfully tragic real-life story.

As I recently experienced with my work on the graphic novel The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song,some real-life stories are so vivid, dramatic and striking that it is a privilege to tell them. I think this is true of Thad's account of John K's manic spiral of a cartooning career.

Thad did his homework very well, with many insightful comments from the various Spumco survivors he interviewed. This book will enrage some fanboys: it's a no-nonsense, decidedly frank look at an obviously talented man who made some great animated cartoons, but had certain personality quirks that brought the walls tumbling down around him.

Thad acknowledges John K's genius, but details the chaos and confusion of his world. I think that even those who don't like Ren & Stimpy would still find this book's historical narrative gripping. It's a remarkable achievement--well done, Thad!

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Might as well plug some recent antics of mine. I occasionally review 1940s and '50s film noirs for the blog, Noir of the Week, which is loosely affiliated with the Film Noir Foundation. This week, I review the thoroughly nutty 1945 sorta-noir, Danger Signal.You might enjoy reading it, and the four other reviews I've done for this blog.

Over the holidays, I put together a collection of some of Dick Briefer's Frankenstein comic-book stories, from public-domain issues of Prize Comics, with an introduction and supplementary features written by me. I am asking a nominal $3.99 for this 146-page e-book, which I think is a bargain for the quantity and quality of the work within, and for the time I put in touching up and sequencing the stories. If you'd like to learn more about this project, visit Comic Book Attic, the blog I share with Paul Tumey, who currently unearths early comics history in his marvelous Masters of Screwball Comics blog. Check out his new essay on pioneering cartoonist/painter Gus Mager.

Note: this post does not count towards the official 250 for this blog.

It's been nearly a year since we continued the series of posts on the early one-shot issues of Marge's Little Lulu, before it was granted its own regular series at the start of 1948. Have crowd, will please!

The previous one-shot, 139, is fully covered on Stanley Stories. You may read "The Hooky Team" HERE, and the other two stories in that issue HERE.

Cover-dated May 1947, this Lulu one-shot was written and penciled by John Stanley. Charles Hedinger, a significant interim artist, did the inked finishes.

Hedinger brings a distinct energy to the table. His Lulu stories have more visual energy than those of Irving Tripp, who would very quickly join Team Lulu. That said, they lack the bristling vigor Stanley's own artwork gave the series. It's a pity Stanley had to cease the finished artwork for Little Lulu.

Without that break, he may not have developed such a sharply focused role as writer, as the series reached its early 1950s peak of all-ages popularity.With a need for consistent high-quality writing, the magazine needed a more focused, in-control Stanley. His presence is just felt enough, through the stagnant-but-effective lens of Tripp's stable, static artwork, to still energize the series.

Stanley's "Little Lulu" stories are typified by their sense of enclosure. The dwellings, streets and buildings--and the suburban vacant lots, such as that which hosts Tubby's boys-only clubhouse, seem small and confined throughout the series.

Today's lead story, "Sunday Afternoon," is a rare occurrence of wide open, rolling and bucolic space in Stanley's Little Lulu. It's also significant as one of the few early LL stories to just feature Lulu and Tubby Tompkins, with no other children or adults to interact with them. Stanley clearly savors the opportunity to have his two main characters spend some quality time together in the great outdoors...

An almost documentary approach distinguishes "Sunday Afternoon" in John Stanley's canon. Seldom do these two characters so truly and completely act like little children. Their off-handed cruelties, and gestures of genuine bonding, ring completely true.

The story is a very simple back-and-forth between Tubby and Lulu. Each attempts to assert their way of thinking--and, in doing so, thwarts the other's effort to achieve a (literally) childishly simple task.

The coda, of Tubby stealing his own mother's roses, is what improv comedians would term a "call back" to a telling incident on the story's first page. Tubby's decision to pick flowers is prompted by the thought that he'll sell them to his mother. This strategy horrifies the always mom-centric Lulu. Tubby's worldly gaze corrupts Lulu's innocent, parent-loving intentions.

That she doesn't know, and Tubby doesn't reveal, that these are his mom's flowers, is a prime example of a Stanley character taking a ride on the ol' karma wheel. His eventual punishment, which occurs off-page and post-story, is keenly felt all the same.

For younger readers, who may wonder who Betty Grable was, here's one of her iconic pin-up photos from the 1940s:

Grable was perhaps the most sexually desired female in 1940s America. If a woman was attractive, she was slangily referred to as an "able Grable." Grable was in the stable of 20th Century Fox Studios, and appeared in dozens of films from 1929 to 1955, including many musicals, a Preston Sturges comedy, and the proto-film noir I Wake Up Screaming. So now you know!

That pop-culture factoid achieved, onto today's second story. "Forbidden Fruit" is significant for the introduction of two themes that would become increasingly important to Stanley's 1950s Lulu. More on that after the story...

"Forbidden Fruit" is a surprisingly tense, moment-to-moment narrative. Incidents of sublime black comedy pepper its pages. The sequence on pp. 8-10, in which Tubby causes a flood, destroys several expensive things, and endangers Lulu's life as she seemingly chokes on a ping-pong ball, is beautifully timed. Each move seems casual, unconscious and utterly borne of Tubby's self-absorbed, inverted world-view.

We're warned of Tubby's self-focus at story's start. Mid-sentence, Tub blathers away about the picture-perfect achievements of his coming years. Lulu's lack of attention suggests that she's heard this spiel often enough to be able to tune it out.

The presence of television--making its debut in the world of Stanley's Little Lulu--creates a delightful side-track in the suspenseful events of "Forbidden Fruit."

Stanley generally avoided references to topical events in Lulu's pages. By 1947, television was enough of a national curiosity that it merited an appearance. It makes sense that isolated Mr. Gripe would own a TV set. As he has no family, and none of the attendant financial obligations, he could afford this still-experimental luxury item.

Before 1950, a TV set was an ostentatious purchase for the average joe. TV appears in a few more "Lulu" stories, but is never a major element. Its place in Gripe's home offers some sociological depth to his character.

Mr. Gripe's presence is another this significant first appearance of an important secondary figure in Little Lulu--the eccentric loner neighbor. This figure, most notoriously seen in the Tubby back-up story "Hide and Seek," from Little Lulu 79, is verbally, and often physically, violent towards children. The Gripes and Kranks of Stanley's world are a troubling presence.

Gripe is more compassionate than later incarnations of this type. He performs CPR on Lulu and retrieves the pent-up ping pong ball. The children have ruined his home, without realizing their actions, and Gripe is slow to notice the destruction. One imagines the off-story sequence in which he discovers his smashed TV set.

It's amusing that the story's colorist opted to make Gripe's set a color TV. Commercially produced color TV sets weren't introduced 'til 1953. Network color programming began, sporadically, the next year, but most American homes had black and white sets until at least the end of the 1960s. (My home stayed black-and-white until 1976, much to my teenage embarrassment.)

It isn't a Little Lulu comic unless it has a fairy-tale sequence, and here's one of the more creative early pieces in this Stanley genre, "Crybaby."

For those used to Witch Hazel, and the standard story-book vibe of the 1950s-era "Lulu" fairy-tales, early pieces, such as "Crybaby," may come as a surprise. Lulu's improvised story never strays from recognizable reality--as interpreted by a seven year-old kid.

Despite its escalating and clever comedy, "Crybaby" climaxes in a scene of violent child discipline. In 1947, whaling the tar out of disobedient kids was common parental practice. There was nothing unusual about its presence in this, and many other "Lulu" stories. It was SOP for child-rearing. Even Dr. Spock condoned it until the later 1950s.

Pop Culture Reference #2: Mrs. Miniver was a 1942 Hollywood movie, made at MGM Studios, and starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. A narrative about a wartime English family who deals with Nazi air-raids, bomb shelters and food rationing, it might have made an interesting tale for Alvin--especially in Lulu's regurgitated, misunderstood version.

For a chaser, here are the three pantomime gag pages of this issue. While Stanley is primarily known for his verbal wit, and fine dialogue, he was also an effective humorist without words. These pages provide a link to the origins of the character. They are, in essence, improvements on the single-panel silent gag cartoons that Marge Buell created before Stanley, in essence, took over the character and made her a vessel for his increasingly talky comedy of manners.

SPOILER ALERT: Once again, I've gathered today's stories in a stand-alone CBR format, which you can download HERE. I put in some time straightening and brightening the pages, and I think it improves the reading experience.

Don't dig CBRs? Rename the file as an RAR extension, unzip it, and read the pages that way. You'll want to read the stories before you partake of my commentary on them.

That said, let's get this show on the road...

A common factor in many of John Stanley's post-1955 comic book stories is their creator's evident lack of personal enjoyment.

The creation of mainstream comic books is almost entirely not about art. It pays badly, it's often high-pressure work, and until recently, most of its publishers regarded the end results as disposable and fleeting. Like any business, it's built on making bucks. Quality is a surprise by-product. That any memorable or lasting work has appeared in American comic books is a small miracle.

John Stanley was perhaps spoiled by his first and best editor, Oskar Lebeck. Like William Gaines and Al Feldstein of E.C. Comics, Lebeck cared about the quality of his creative team's output. When Stanley lost Lebeck's guiding hand, in the 1950s, he suddenly seemed to enjoy his work much less.

As the 1950s wore on, Stanley's work becomes more mechanical and less spontaneous. Stanley's gritting-of-teeth, in the last two years of Little Lulu, overshadows any moments of genuine inspiration and joy. The stories are still of an overall high quality, but they seem forced. Despite themselves, they continue to entertain and, occasionally, surprise. They have much less wattage than Stanley's work of the 1945-55 period.

If Stanley felt burned out on Little Lulu in its last couple of years, he made some effort to disguise his ennui. The real fallout of his burnout hit hard in Stanley's oft-joyless tenure on Nancy/Nancy and Sluggo.

Though frequently inspired, Stanley's Nancy work bears the weight of responsibility, and obligation, over the sense that the creator genuinely gets a kick from his work.

As Nancy represented a forced attempt to tread the oh-so-familiar ground of Lulu, it's most impressive when Stanley's anger and frustration elbows its way to the stories' fragile, downcast center-stage. There is energy in Stanley's anger--a vitality that also fuels the much better, more original series Dunc 'n' Loo.

Had the fun gone out of creating comics for John Stanley, as the 1950s ended?

Not entirely. He found his way back in the 1960s, via his two "auteur" series, Melvin Monster and Thirteen Going on Eighteen. An important transitional title was Clyde Crashcup, based on a TV cartoon property.

We've done Clyde here before, but its significance, in the amount of fun Stanley seems to have with this series, has grown on me. Like Lulu's Tubby Tompkins, Clyde is a perfect character for John Stanley. Self-obsessed, quixotic and fearless, Clyde is also a creator. With his magic pencil as the conduit from his subconscious to comic book reality, he can realize anything, have it function, and retool it on the fly.

The irony is that all these things already exist. Clyde is too well-sold on his own brilliance to stop and think that someone, somewhere, must have had the same idea and, sans magic pencil, done it the hard way. his fittingly mute assistant, Leonardo, attempts to act as the always-needed Voice of Reason, typically in vain.

Like most of John Stanley's work for comics, this is a re-think and refinement of an existent idea. Rather like Clyde, Stanley "invented" what was already there--but did the character better by improving and expanding on the (typically under-developed) original.

Thus, Stanley owns Clyde, Little Lulu, Woody Woodpecker and The Little King in a way the original creators don't. They had the birth of a notion, but nothing else (with the exception of Otto Soglow, whose own creativity just about meets Stanley's).

This third issue of Clyde Crashcup is perhaps the best of the five-issue run. Reunited with his longstanding Lulu partner, Irving Tripp, and given an unusual character he can really sink his teeth into, John Stanley rolls up his sleeves and has fun with his work.

"Clyde Crashcup Invents The Scare" is something of a tour de force for artist Tripp, as he fearlessly depicts wild horses, roller coasters, haunted houses and dirty dishes with a solid-yet-sketchy astro-modern cartooning style.

Crashcup's self-absorption and unflappable self-belief fuel this story. He believes that only he can cure Leonardo's hiccups, and creates an ever-growing arc of devices to attempt this simple task. The grander these ideas become, the more of a toll they take on their creator--while effecting no change whatsoever on Leonardo's gastric distress.

As Crashcup says of his final creation's self-effect, "one more second... and I'd have lost my REASON!" In a finale apt for the "Goodman Beaver Lite" vibe of the series, a kid's exploded paper bag cures Leonardo--and transfers the hiccups to Crashcup, now able to torment himself further.

"Clyde Crashcup Invents Glue" clicks on the inventor's obvious high self-regard. "I am admiring an EXCELLENT PICTURE of me in today's newspaper," he glibly admits at story's start.

That self-love is echoed by a series of increasingly self-destructive invention attempts, as Clyde tries to capture that self-image for posterity.

Tripp's lively, loose cartooning helps sell this simple story, which again ends on a self-evident note of irony.

By now, Stanley is fully warmed up, and in "... Invents Deep-Sea Fishing," he makes some rare self-referential remarks, via his characters.

In a genuinely Kurtzman-esque moment, Crashcup addresses a trope of comic books and animated cartoons--something we take for granted, as no attention is called to it.

The very act of calling attention is important, and I'm glad at least one popular culture creator addressed this vital logic flaw of so many mass-market entertainments:

Tripp has some fun with the blowsy blonde mermaid, who also sees fit to question Clyde's ability to speak under-water. We mostly know Tripp for the stiff, mechanical linework of Little Lulu. It's a pleasure to see him cut loose in this series.

The last two stories revisit some pet themes of Stanley's "Lulu"-- the war of the sexes and the questionable pleasures of the public park.

"Clyde Crashcup Invents Chivalry" frames the inventor's eccentricities against a merciless world of "...selfish men and roughneck ladies!"

For the first time in this issue, we see Clyde and Leonardo in a world not of Crashcup's invention. Like the worlds of Dunc 'n' Loo, Melvin Monster and Thirteen, it's not an easy place for a sensitive soul.

Noble deeds are misinterpreted, and mankind's first impulse is to react with violence, not reason. If this is Clyde's reality, small wonder he spends so much time in retreat, re-creating a habitable universe. That these attempts fail adds a layer of poignancy to what would otherwise be a mechanical sitcom shell.

Clyde's attempts to create the world of Arthurian chivalry--a more brutal place than the 20th century--is more heart-breaking than funny, despite a clever reference to Cervantes' myopic tilter-at-windmills, and a hip update of the Robin Hood cliche. For the first time, Clyde gains some humanity, whether by design or by blissful coincidence.

This mood is sustained as "Clyde Crashcup Invents Spring--" a timely farce, as we descend into the season of pollen, stinging eyes and burlesque-comedy sneezes as a way of life.

Again, Clyde rebels against the establishment--both of the uncontrollable climate and the regulated-but-dangerous world of the urban public park. By inventing spring, as a reaction against the "...endless dreary round of COUGHS, COLDS and SNEEZES," Crashcup blindly sets himself up for more negative social interactions. Bees, cops, rams, babies, jealous boyfriends and mud puddles batter our innocent hero relentlessly.

He, of course, winds up sick in bed from this caring attempt to force the world to be a nicer place.

That familiar John Stanley message--that the world is a frightening, uncertain place--caroms through his two decades of published work. It sounds more often, and more shrilly, in his stories of the 1960s, and casts a shadow across the most light-hearted events.

In his hands, Clyde Crashcup is more than another droll Space-Age throwaway. While Stanley's joy of creation shines through these five stories, the heavy weight of his central, melancholy message anchors their knockabout antics. This was Stanley's greatest gift as a comedic writer, and constant tension of dark and light in his late work remains gripping--moreso than the comics themselves have the right to be.

P.S.: All of Stanley's stories for this series are now available via this blog. Enjoy!

Two things of interest:

A complete collection of John Stanley's "Peterkin Pottle" stories has been posted, for free, at the Digital Comics Museum. Richard Davidson did this compilation, and it's handy to have all seven of these stories in one spot. Click on the image to go to the download page.

I have started a new blog which, like Stanley Stories, focuses on the work of one creator. In this new blog, I'll look at the Warner Brothers animated cartoons of Fred "Tex" Avery, and, I hope, trace the important developmental paths of these 60+ films--many of them landmarks in the reclamation of animation from the Disney influence. Click on the above image, or visit it at http://texaveryatwb.blogspot.com/

Of all the titles edited by Oskar Lebeck for Dell Publications, NewFunnies seems most spontaneous and slapdash. The bar was set quite low for this title. Quality of story and art material wavers dramatically from issue to issue.

In 1946 and '47, the title was a place for John Stanley to blow off steam, as he prepared for what he didn't yet realize was a 15-year run on Little Lulu. His story (and art) for that series is impeccable. Perhaps because the licensed property was of a higher status (and its creator was initially looking over the collective Lebeck shoulder), Stanley's Lulu is tighter, less risky and more grounded than any of his other work in comics.

While under close watch on the early Little Lulu one-shot issues (most of which you'll find elsewhere on this blog), Stanley catered to his chaotic, more off-the-cuff impulses in New Funnies. He did some of his best--and worst--work for the series.

At their finest, these stories are freewheeling, very funny and full of a street-wise charm, In their low points, they reveal their creator's burn-outs, hangovers or crunched-deadline hackwork. New Funnies was clearly not a high priority on either Dell's or Lebeck's agenda.

Offered today are Stanley's 31 pages of story for issue 116 of New Funnies, cover-dated October, 1946. I've isolated these three stories in a CBR file that you may download HERE. (If you don't like the CBR format, just rename the extension to RAR and open it with WinRar or other, similar programs).

Spoilers abound in the text that follows. Those who read the following without reading the stories themselves are living far too dangerously for their own good.
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Stanley is in better-than-average form in these three stories. They clearly illustrate his often-expressed philosophy that the outside world is a dangerous place, and that we protagonists are chess-pieces in the hands of unseen fate. Sometimes we're moved to exciting places and sometimes we're stale-mated (and check-mated) by random events.

"Andy Panda" exquisitely details a waking nightmare in post-WW II America. As Stanley points out constantly in his 1946/7 stories, victorious post-war America was still a promised land full of vexing shortages.

Stanley hits this note so often, in this year, that it seems autobiographical. In the New Funnies world, everything from pajamas to hot dogs are scarce. Their appearance incites riot-like behavior in the most passive people. Anyone who desires the most commonplace things--pieces of the entitled American Dream--is guaranteed a harrowing experience.

We're tipped off to this problem in a subtle way: clothes are so scarce that Charlie Chicken, Andy's soul-mate, earns pocket change by renting Andy's one good suit. Its last renter left it covered with barbecue grease. "I charged him 20 cents extra in damages," Charlie says, in feeble self-defense.

In a Tubby-like burst of self-belief, Charlie concocts an acidic "spot remover" from his chemistry set, and destroys the garment. Here, Andy's worries begin. We see him rehearsing a speech for the Ladies' Club in his sleep--a violent narrative out of a pulp magazine, and as such, hardly suitable for his genteel audience.

The speech itself doesn't rattle Andy, but being reduced to his pajamas does. Naively he sends Charlie out to buy a new suit. This leads to the delightfully barbed sequence, from pp. 3-5, in which it's made clear that clothes make gold look common in this world. The only suit left for purchase is so gaudy that, in Charlie's words, "Andy wouldn't even wear that in Miami!"

Andy is forced out on the street in his PJs, in a vain search for clothes that are "...conservative! Not zoot!" For our younger readers, a bit of historical info: zoot suits were the 1940s equivalent of those shiny track suits that rappers wear. Gaudy, exaggerated clothing, zoot suits were scorned by the Andy Pandas of their day, who favored the more respectable but equally absurd dress wear of post-war America, which included ridiculously short neckties and wide lapels.

Andy's quest for clothed dignity pushes him further into the epicenter of embarrassment. Because he's so blandly conformist, Stanley rakes him over the coals. He rejects a Hamlet outfit at a costume shop, loses his pajama pants, and is forced to rent the only stock left in the place--a horse outfit.

Ironically, Andy's frantic costume-bound performance (in which he's chased by a lazy beat cop whose horse he and Charlie startled) goes over big with the Ladies' Club. This Preston Sturges-ish slapstick finale adds comic irony to the finale: all the fuss and bother Andy and Charlie went through ultimately didn't amount to anything.

In the "Oswald Rabbit" story, trouble comes knocking via special delivery. A sarcastic, plump messenger brings Todo, a sentient "cannibal plant," to Oswald and Toby. It's the dying gift of Os' rich Uncle Rios, who appears to have been a recent meal of Todo's.

Oswald and Toby are a duller shadow of Andy Panda and his poultry partner. Thus, something worse has to happen to them. Todo takes over the household. He attempts to eat Oswald, but rejects him as unsavory. They attempt to give him a ham sandwich, extended on a broom. Todo eats the broomstick and the jar of mustard.

He smokes cigars and flicks the ashes on the carpet--a move that finally angers Oswald and Toby. The emphasis is now far away from the possibility of Todo eating the rabbit or bear--this is not Chew Chew Baby, the deeply disturbing 1958 animated cartoon.

Todo exists only to annoy these two docile domestics. After Toby's deep-fried cooking nearly kills Todo, he literally turns a new leaf, and falls in love with a rose growing in the backyard. He still poses a menace to neighborhood cats, but, at story's end, has mellowed (somewhat).

A lightweight piece, this "Oswald" story has some subtle, dry moments of black humor, but one gets the sense that Stanley dislikes the characters, and is most interested in tormenting them. The story is funnier and smarter than it has any right to be.

"Woody Woodpecker" delays its namesake's entrance, and the casual calamity the bird brings to others, until its second page.

Stanley felt warmest towards Woody, and usually saved his best material for the anti-social bird. (Woody's most delayed entrance occurs in this story, which features in-joke caricatures of Stanley and artists Mo Gollub and Dan Noonan.)

Woody passively enters the waterfront setting, in search of cheap seafood. He is crowned with a mass of wriggling live eels. He runs, Hydra-like, down the cobbled street, and into a tavern, where the seagoin' toughs empty out at the sight of him.

It just happens that a "cross-eyed, red-headed woodpecker brings more hard luck than anything," according to a piece of sailor superstition I didn't know about. Armed with this new status as a social threat, Woody has fun being a pariah. He causes a blackjack-wielding shanghai-er to attempt hara-kari when he's trapped in a blind alley.

Woody frisks the presumed corpse, finds the guy's wallet, and good-naturedly carries him back to the S. S. Rustbottom--to the horror of the ship's captain. He and his crew jump ship, as Woody enjoys a good horse-laugh.

Left alone to man the wheel, Woody attempts to drive cross-town, to catch a trolley car--a more down-to-earth form of transportation he trusts best. He collides the ship with a bridge, sneaks aboard a jostled trolley in the chaos, and is quickly evicted as a non-paying rider. Booted off the car, he shrugs his shoulders with an "Oh, well!"

All in a day's work for this woodpecker. This simple story is a wonder of narrative purpose. Woody moves in one direction, never stopping to think about the consequences of his actions, or, more importantly, where he's going. This underdog relishes the chance to wreak havoc, but quickly forgets the whole set-up.

The story is a thin excuse for casual calamity of the streetwise, of-the-fly nature that distinguishes New Funnies, the ragtag underdog of the Oskar Lebeck offices. The near-improvisational feel of these three stories, though often sloppily executed, is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that Dell Comics weren't always dull comics.

One thing I must finish on this blog, as it reaches its end, is the remarkable run by John Stanley, Charles Hedinger and others on the one-shot issues of Little Lulu that precede its regular run.

This is the only Lulu one-shot that I own, although my copy is nothing to brag about. It is one of the worst-printed 1940s comics I've ever seen. When colors aren't wretchedly out of register, the black lines are fuzzy, clogged with ink, and otherwise bear all the signs of the end of a print run.

Thank goodness, I'll spare you a look at my version--these are top-drawer scans done by some anonymous kind soul a few years ago.

Many of the scans I've shared here, over the years, have come from such sources. I feel that I've never properly thanked these folks for all their hard, painstaking work in making these rare old comics available for study, reading and sharing (as I have done here with you).

These early Little Lulus suffer terribly when seen in black and white, as I've said before. Their simple contour lines were meant to be filled with the flat pastels and blunt primary colors of 1947 comics. Western's self-printed titles had a color palette all their own. After 1948, they are consistently well-printed comics. From 1943 to '47, buyer beware! Unless you somehow score a copy from the start of a press run, chances are the Dell title of this era will be a blurry, mis-registered mess.

But enough of that. Let's get down to brass knuckles, er, tacks. I usually choose a percentage of the stories in each of these one-shots. This book is so consistently great that I've opted to share the whole thing here today.

This significant issue firmly defines the character of Tubby Tompkins, who dominates three of the stories here--including one of Stanley's masterpieces, "Just A Gigolo." Tubby is a machine fueled on sheer chutzpah, and on an unbreakable self-belief. He and Lulu have a complex friendship. Each believes their role in the relationship is to shepherd and correct the other, as if they'd perish without this unrequested counsel.

This relationship is not yet perfected. Lulu herself is still a work in progress. She's far more passive than the definitive version of the early 1950s. She doesn't yet question things as much as assume that, since things happen a certain way, there must be some good reason for it. She's still compelled to dig deeper, and in this issue, her character makes certain breakthroughs that pave the way to the classic c. 1951 Lulu.

"For President" has no story to speak of. It does capture, with almost documentary effect, the OCD-lite tendencies of children. In the 1946-7 "Lulu" stories, this seems to preoccupy John Stanley. It occasions gentle, charming character-based humor that would soon be removed from the series.

Were this story written in 1954, the stakes would be higher, Lulu's proto-feminist ire raised, and Tubby's scheming and self-grandeur more in the forefront. Here, Lulu is neither Marge's poker-faced imp, or Stanley's solid mid-'50s character.

Spanking (at least, that's what the story's last panel implies) is a park of the dark side of the Little Lulu universe. Stanley's use of this parental violence as a punchline is coolly disturbing, but it doesn't snuff out the charm of the kids' rambling actions, all justified based on what little they know about the world.

Tubby's tree-chopping has a tell-tale link to a Stanley-drawn 1946 "Woody Woodpecker" story. Here's page from that slightly earlier piece:

The serial use of funny devices by Stanley, Barks, Kelly and other A-game "kids' comics" creators may have been influenced by the quick turnstile of their work's readership. Stanley's re-use of these devices in "Lulu" stories has proven most helpful in my attempt to identify unsigned/uncredited work I believe to be his.

"Takes The Cake" has another connection to a New Funnies story--this time, a simultaneous reference to the common mid-century baked good known as the coffee ring. Both this comic and New Funnies 125 bear publication dates of August, 1947. Here's a page from that comic's "Andy Panda" story, in which its nauseated protagonist shares the kids' low opinion of the coffee ring:

What was a coffee ring? According to the Random House dictionary:
"noun--

acoffeecakeshapedlikearing,plainorfruited,oftenwithatoppingofraisins,groundnuts,andicing."

Hmmm--sounds suspiciously like a fruit-cake to me!

Not seen much anymore, this once-popular pastry must have rubbed Stanley the wrong way sometime earlier in the year. So now you know!

That aside, "Takes The Cake" further explores the whimsical world-view of these two little children. Tubby's final, triumphant rejection of adult "common sense" ends this low-key story on a beautiful note. Again, these are not the characters of Lulu and Tubby as would so quickly be set in stone. Stanley seemed especially keen to experiment with the two key characters in these 1947 stories.

The centerpiece of this issue is "Just A Gigolo," which deserves a berth on the list of Stanley's masterpieces. This bittersweet story is Stanley's first elegant treatise on the war between the sexes.

One genuinely feels for Lulu over the course of "Just A Gigolo." Tubby's finance-based attraction/repulsion to her, and her befuddled attempts to fight against his shallow egotism, is somewhat heart-breaking. The sting of real feeling pervades what might otherwise just be another funny comic-book story.

"Just A Gigolo" bears some similarities to one of the only 1940s animated Little Lulu cartoons to include Tubby (as "Fatso"), 1945's Beau Ties, which you can view on YouTube by clicking the link on that there title. The story's resemblance makes me wonder if Stanley saw this cartoon, and was inspired to try a variation on its storyline.

Beau Ties too quickly goes into larger-than-life cartoon action, where "Just A Gigolo" keeps its feet on the ground of recognizable reality. Tubby's betrayal of Lulu and the ur-Gloria blond girl, Dolly, is divinely paid off in his nausea from too many ice cream sodas.

Earlier in the story, on its second and third pages, there is gravity to Lulu's frank discussion of Tubby's hurtful behavior with her startled mother. Though her mother's advice is thoughtful, Lulu warps it to fit her perception of the world.

Both she and Dolly are taken to the cleaners by Tubby. After justice has been served, via castor oil, and Tubby is out of the picture, Dolly and Lulu touchingly become allies. "Just A Gigolo" has one of John Stanley's most perfect endings, and should be in any best-of collection of "Little Lulu," if/when one is created (which I hope happens soon).

By this time, the inclusion of a Lulu-narrated (and composed) fairy tale was de rigeur for the series. "Lulu's Lamp" is this issue's entry.

I've said my piece about the significance and importance of these fairy-tale episodes in Stanley's canon elsewhere on this blog (it's one of the current top ten pieces herein). "Lulu's Lamp" has a couple of small twists to the series' formula.

Lulu's fantasy, on p. 2, of an adult Alvin calling on still-prepubescent Lulu, is a lovely bit of character insight. That Lulu cannot imagine herself an adult gives us a subtle window inside her head.

The story's open-ended finale is both surprise and cop-out. It would appear that Stanley simply ran out of space. The four extra pages he gave "Just A Gigolo" forced him to suddenly end "Lulu's Lamp." The dilemma of the unresolved story is proper food for thought, but it smacks of necessity, rather than invention. This never happens again in Stanley's many "Little Lulu" stories.

I've still got a couple more posts left to do. The hard part remains finding something that merits posting and analysis. But something will come up sooner or later, so please stay tuned...

Wrapup

Yes, this blog still lives, although it may appear to be on a life-support system. Short of the book project I hope to do someday (and which seems a hard sell, for reasons that baffle me), I feel that I've said all there is to say about John Stanley, in the format of this blog.

I could do a story-by-story analysis of his work, but that might kill all the joy of reading Stanley's comics for others. I believe that any reader curious about John Stanley can quickly gain a sense of who he was, and what his work was about, via the nearly 250 posts extant on this blog.

Here's something a bit more far-reaching than usual for this blog. This would be at home at one of my other comics criticism blogs, Comic Book Attic, which Paul Tumey and I occasionally revive.

Though his name was unknown to readers until the 1960s. Stanley was, certainly, a celebrity within the industry of the American comic book. His longstanding success as the writer/base artist of Marge's Little Lulu (which was a regular top 20 bestseller on US newsstands) made him a comics figure to watch--and emulate.

When the words "emulate" and "comics" are used in the same sentence, the company that would, one day, be Marvel Comics, springs instantly to mind. Timely-Atlas-Marvel built its publishing empire on borrowed ideas. To be fair, so did the rest of the comic book industry in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. If Company A published a popular title, Companies B-Z rushed out their simulacra ASAP, to get their chunk of coin while the gettin' was good.

In the post-war comics market, in which super-heroes were marginalized and genre comics such as crime, romance, war and funny animal were in, competitors did pulpy battle on America's newsstands. Martin Goodman's publishing empire, of which comics were one small but lucrative slice, led the field in providing ready-made imitations of any cresting trend.

Goodman's editor-writer Stanley Leiber closely watched the comics market and kept a large staff of artists (and freelancers) busy in post-war America with his copycat versions of others' innovations. To be fair once again, Lee did a certain amount of innovation. He began a line of short-story horror and fantasy comics just before the more celebrated Entertaining Comics (EC) inaugurated their line in 1950.

Marvel Tales 93, cover-dated August 1949,
was one of the first horror-fantasy short
story anthology comics

Timely-Atlas' bread and butter were in cheerful, energetic and shameless copies of what EC, DC, Prize, Hillman, Dell and other rivals first brought to American pop-culture. Lee was an expert (if superficial) mimic of the styles of other comics creators. A hearty post could be written, elsewhere, on his intentional imitation of the storytelling rhythms and techniques of Harvey Kurtzman's war comics,

Lee's gift, in this aspect, was to (a) spot a trend before it crested and (b) channel its basic superficial aspects to the very edge of plagiarism. He did this constantly during the post-war boom period of the American comic book. This hustler spirit kept Goodman's comics line alive during the devastating industry implosion of the late 1950s.

Stan Lee was obviously aware of John Stanley's work and career. I have no evidence that the two men met, but they were undoubtedly on each others' professional radar.

The first evidence of Stan Lee's Stanley fixation was Little Lizzie, which premiered in spring 1949. I posted about Lizzie three years ago in THIS POST. Drawn by David Gantz, the title was an odd farrago of Stanley's early Little Lulu and Ernie Bushmiller's newspaper comic strip Nancy, which had just entered its peak creative period.

In an interview posted on the invaluable Timely-Atlas reference site More Than Heroes, David Gantz charitably described the series as "...a Little Lulu takeoff." He also credits writer Kin Platt as a possible author. Lee's touch is evident in the stories, which include characters named "Lumpkin," which was a pet name of the author.

The first run of Little Lizzie lasted five issues. Its curious format made it appear to be sourced from a newspaper comic strip, and it does not read well as a result.

A few months before the end of its run, a curious story appeared in one of Timely-Atlas-Marvel's many romance comic books. "Blind Date!," published in Girl Comics #2 (cover-dated January 1950) features a fictional character named John Stanley, who looks remarkably like the real-life comics creator. The story is no great shakes, but here it is, for curiosity's sake:

The Grand Comic Book Database suggests that this story was inked by Joe Kubert. The website is wrong more often than it's right, but there does appear to be Kubert's distinct touch in its bland-but-crisp finishes.

"Blind Date!"'s sole fascination is the strong visual resemblance of its fictional Stanley to the real-life version.

Though generically rendered, the story's Stanley has the dashing figure and wavy dark hair of the real-life person. In other scenes of "Blind Date!" the resemblance is stronger. John Stanley somewhat resembled film actor Fred McMurray and modern comedian Norm McDonald. (The latter would be my first call for the John Stanley bio-pic that will never, ever be filmed.)

The story is a trivial detour, as a work of its own merit. It's more significant as one of string of emulations and curious coincidences that pepper the post-war Timely-Atlas output. Prowling through their comics of this era, one finds such things unexpectedly strewn, like a dead mouse left on your doorstep by a cat.

Stanley and Stan Lee would again intersect in 1953, when Little Lulu was at its arguable series peak.A thoroughly established, best-selling title, it was ripe for a second plunder. Lee enlisted the talented artist Howard Post to draw the series. As he had done with Harvey Kurtzman, and the equally-shameless Blondie rip-off, Rusty, Lee apparently instructed Post to make the revived Little Lizzie look as close to its "inspiration" as possible.

Speaking of which, while we're so aggressively off-topic, here is one of the Kurtzman "Rusty" stories:

Harvey Kurtzman, one of the most influential and game-changing creators of the post-war comics scene, was a considerably greater talent than Howard Post. Both men, under the instruction of Lee, created painfully obvious imitations of iconic comics figures. The experience could not have been pleasant.

It was, however, an ignominy upon which American comic books were built. To single Stan Lee out is a bit like picking one of the wooden ducks at a fairground target-shooting game. Every publisher did this, and continues to do so.

Even John Stanley and Carl Barks worked within this system--on a higher level. Both men built comics careers on the backs of licensed properties. The basic characters and worlds of "Donald Duck" and "Little Lulu" had been established, and made publicly popular, before Barks and Stanley created their similiar-yet-unique comics equivalents.

Both men made significant alterations to these high-profile licensed characters--add-ons and changes that no modern corporate lawyers would allow. "Lulu" was one in a long series of licensed properties in John Stanley's career. His comics career began with licensed properties--he first worked on the pre-comics title Mickey Mouse Magazine--and continued through 1964 with his last such project, a comic book based on the animated TV character Clyde Crashcup.

Stanley's attempts to create original comic book series were failures until 1961, when he began a six-year run on the teen humor series Thirteen Going on Eighteen. This title was Stanley's only long-lasting original comic book.

Carl Barks attempted to develop original comic book features, but never got one off the ground. Their peer, Walt Kelly, created a hit series, "Pogo Possum," took it with him when he left comic books in the late 1940s--and then licensed it back to Dell in the early 1950s.

This must have been a confounding turn of events for Barks and Stanley. Nonetheless, both men did remarkable, innovative work within the perimeters of established characters and concepts. That they were allowed a freedom unthinkable to today's work-for-hire cartoonists--to redefine main characters, introduce significant new figures, and to take these hot properties in directions alien to their regular appearances--is nothing short of a miracle.

No miracles were in Howard Post's corner with Little Lizzie. I hope the work he did on this series helped pay his light bills and put food on his table.

Here's the cover of the first issue of the revived Lizzie, aside the September, 1953 issue of Little Lulu. The two comics would have inhabited newsstands side-by-side. A child not yet savvy could easily be fooled by the fake:

Post made some small attempt to give his imitations some visual variety. Post's natural brush-line, which suggests Walt Kelly*, creates a pretty perfect knock-off of Stanley's cover images.

The interior stories smack of Stan Lee's hand. As with his replicas of Harvey Kurtzman's EC war pieces, Lee's version of John Stanley is a facile, superficial rip-off, with all of the broad strokes and none of the character, charm or creativity of its apparent source. Post does a professional job illustrating these pieces, but, as the Rusty experience was for Kurtzman, Lizzie may have been a depressing chapter in Post's career (which included a animation director position at Paramount's Famous Studios in the 1960s).

Here are three stories, just out of morbid fascination...

Remarkably, one of the minor characters, "Bookworm Benny," has no analog in the Stanley original.He can be seen as a stand in for Lulu's Willy, but he is, otherwise, just a stock type of no importance.

The mere existence of Little Lizzie, in its two incarnations, is proof of John Stanley's contemporary impact on his comic book peers.

As well, it's one of many curious detours found in the study of the 1950s Timely-Atlas comic book line. These dime pamphlets, forgotten as soon as they were published, speak to the very nature of American popular culture. The tail is never far away from the snake's mouth--in movies, TV, fiction, non-fiction, video games and comics. The snake's compulsion to swallow his tail has, perhaps, never been stronger.

Next time, we'll have a for-real, all John Stanley post. Thanks for reading this.
_________________________________________________________________
* Howard Post did a number of Walt Kelly imitations for DC Comics in the late 1940s; several of them appeared in the late issues of its longest-running anthology, More Fun Comics.

I'm currently at work on this e-book, which may prove the most fascinating of the series. The years 1961-1967 were among John Stanley's most productive and creative in the comics world. The sheer volume of high quality original material from his hand is striking.

I have decided to save the 1950s bibliography for later. Because of the proliferation of mock-Stanley comics by other employees of Western Publications, some serious consideration remains before I can assemble that volume.

The variety and depth of this 1960s material is surprising. I look forward to completing this e-book and offering it here. It will be reasonably priced, and will also contain some not-likely-to-be-reprinted complete stories of this era.

Keep your eyes on Stanley Stories for more details...

I am pleased to offer for sale this 104-page e-book (in PDF format) that chronologically lists every published story written (and often drawn) by John Stanley, from 1961 to 1971. It's only available here, for the low price of $4.99 USD.

Here's its cover image:

Here are two sample spreads from the e-book. I've written brief, simple synopses of each story, and included the cover image from each 1960s comic book with Stanley material.

As well, there's a bonus section of several un-reprinted, hard to find stories and covers from the decade annotated and discussed in the book. Here is the listing of the 34 pages of bonus comics material included herein:

An all-new five page essay helps add historical context to this material. Though none of this work was critically lauded in its day, it is a strong and highly varied body of stories, issues and overall concepts. Stanley explored new genres and re-established himself as a writer-artist. He could experiment, reconsider and revise his ideas as he worked.

Almost no other mainstream comics creator enjoyed such freedom in the 1960s. Once L. B. Cole was replaced by DJ Arneson as Dell's comics editor, sometime in 1962, Stanley worked with little (if any) restriction. Producing comics from his home in Continental Village, New York, a rural community located near Peekskill, Stanley was removed from the Manhattan mainstream of publishers' offices and hustling freelancers.

Stanley was a very private man, and there remains much to be learned--if, indeed, such things are possible--about this vital decade of his comics career. How and why it ended--what circumstances drove Stanley away from Dell's employ, and what led to his brief time at Gold Key, a reformed version of his former patron, Western Publications--remains vague, at best. Most, if not all, of the people involved are dead, and no one apparently bothered to record any such events.

Ultimately, the work must speak for itself. Although the third act of Stanley's career ended tragically, for reasons perhaps never known, it is the peak period of his achievements as a comics storyteller and artist. He expressed himself with a freedom and forthrightness that remains refreshing, inspiring and is a creative landmark in a medium so often ruled by profit margins and the bottom line.

This bibliography is, in a sense, a focused celebration of this fertile and rewarding decade that brought John Stanley's comics career to an unfortunate but rousing close.

Scattered among the book's listings is some interesting Stanley trivia. Find out the answer to questions you never knew you wanted to ask, such as:

What was the only Comics-Code approved story of John Stanley's career?
What was the last licensed property Stanley worked with in his career?
What John Stanley comic was partially reprinted in an abridged format?

As a follow-up bonus to the release of this e-book, I'll scan and feature here the two stories that answer the second question above--a real surprise that has been hidden in plain sight for 45 years.

To order the 1960s John Stanley Bibliography for only $4.99 USD, you can click the button below and buy it via PayPal. Upon payment, you will be e-mailed a password-protected download link. The password will be changed every 48 hours, so be sure to promptly download the file, which is 145 MB in size.

Perhaps this will inspire some of you out there to purchase the 1960s John Stanley Bibliography. Despite an immediate plug on the daily blog of The Comics Journal, it has yet to sell a single copy. It's priced at $4.99. Here's a PayPal payment button:

You can also buy it, bundled with the earlier 1940s Stanley bibliography, for six dollars. There's a PayPal button to the right of this article if that option is of interest.

End of sales pitch. Here is perhaps the most fascinating find I made in my months of work on this new 104-page e-book. I found this 1969 issue of New Terrytoons in the late 1990s. At that time, I assumed its contents were all reprints.

The title was started by Dell Comics in 1960, before its break with Western Publications. Stanley wrote stories for its fourth through eighth issues. For many years, it was thought that these were his final comics of the funny animal genre.

The Terrytoons properties were among those Western took with them when they reformed as Gold Key Comics in 1962. The title was quickly cancelled in 1963 with its third issue.

Dell got a temporary lien on the characters for three comics in 1966/67. Typical of their post-Western, non-Stanley output, they were terrible comics, and the Terry license apparently reverted to Gold Key. They revived New Terrytoons in mid-1969, picking up where they left off in issue numbering. At least one of the stories within is a reprint, from the 1960/61 Dell run of the series. I had every reason to believe that two of the other three "Heckle and Jeckle" stories were also reprints, or inventory backlog.

As I have learned what little there is to know about the last years of John Stanley's comics career, it's become clear that he quit Dell in 1967, took about one year off from comics, and then approached Gold Key/Western for work in 1968 or early '69. This suggests that some last straw was broken at Dell, and that Stanley sought to return to the company that had first and longest employed him as a comics creator.

Stanley did first issues of two titles for Gold Key--the TV ad knockoff Choo Choo Charlieand his final original creation, O. G. Whiz. Sometime in 1971, another event caused Stanley to walk away from the comics industry for good. He took up work at a small company called Fairgate Rule. Michael Barrier has done some remarkable research into this post-comics phase of Stanley's life, and has a haunting essay about Fairgate and Stanley HERE.

In between those two book-length comics, Stanley found time to write and draw a pair of "Heckle and Jeckle" stories. Compare these two pieces to the contents of Charlie or Whiz and it's quite evident this is 1969 work.

The three comics share a burst of compressed, garrulous and colorful hard comedy, peppered with finely-honed wordplay and much of the frenzied physical action seen in Stanley's auteur comics Thirteen Going on Eighteen and Melvin Monster. While neither of today's story offerings is a masterpiece, they offer us another fascinating late glimpse of John Stanley's writing and (partial) artwork.

Stanley did no further stories for New Terrytoons. Subsequent issues are largely reprints of the first Dell run, filled out with new stuff crapped out by the Gold Key staff. Why Stanley was approached to do these stories makes sense: he'd done dozens of similar pieces in the 1940s and early '60s. They circle back to his earliest work for Western Publications, in titles such as New Funnies and Our Gang Comics. Many examples of those 1940s stories are found elsewhere on this blog.

The first of these stories, "The Restaurant Business," was featured on the first version of Stanley Stories, nearly 15 years ago. These are new scans, and are substantially larger and better than the earlier attempt. This story has the closest ties to Stanley's '60s material. The theme of a pretentious French restaurant figures in two of Stanley's finest '60s stories, "Mice Business" (Melvin Monster #3) and "Dress Affair," from Dunc and Loo #4.

This is Stanley's cover, with some modifications by Western's art staff. The paint blotches on the palette and the apple cores are redolent of Stanley's brush style. It's probable that the figures of Heckle and Jeckle may have been touched up by another hand.

Several Stanley tropes dominate "The Restaurant Business," from the myopia of Heckle and Jeckle, who mistake the French eatery for the public library, to the constant status shifts between the uptight manager and the bouncer, Beef, who is paid in bananas.

Heckle and Jeckle are typical Stanley trouble-makers. They shift their behavior with the uncertain situation. Their constant goal is to best the authority figure(s) and make the most of their mistaken assumptions.

Stanley's hand is evident in the artwork, although it appears another artist did the ink finishes. The ink artist may have simply light-boxed Stanley's script, which would have been sketched out in comics form. The remarkable vigor of the figures, and the design of the characters, smack of Stanley's work.

"The Fastest Guns in the West" strongly resembles Stanley's "Woody Woodpecker" stories of the mid-1940s. As in those stories, the main character(s), armed only with their wits and their strong cognitive biases, assess a dangerous situation without the realistic understanding that might frighten or worry them.

If John Stanley was Vladimir Nabokov, we could chalk the constant woodpecker references in "Fastest Guns" as some meta-allusion to the 1940s New Funnies material. Stanley claimed (or feigned) forgetfulness of his past work. When pressed by fans in the early 1990s, Stanley rejected work that was obviously his, and claimed authorship of some comics he clearly had nothing to do with.

As a final callback to the anarchic spirit of the 1940s material, "Fastest Guns" is a fond farewell. Stanley's refined sense of wordplay, and of escalating physical comedy, brings more substance to this story than it has any right to possess.

Stanley appears to be in a fine mood in these two stories. He seems to have had a good time writing them, and the touches of his hand in their artwork (which may have been finished by Lloyd White--and that's just a remote guess on my part) gives them a suitable vigor.

This is just one piece of the rich and complex puzzle that comprises the final works of John Stanley. To learn more, consider a purchase of the new 1960s bibilography. Thanks!

I have posted examples of John Stanley's work on the early 1950s series Henry Aldrich here in the past.

As time has gone by, my study of this series' early issues has gradually revealed much more of Stanley's input than I first realized.

Stanley wrote the entirety of the first two issues of Henry, skipped the third, and returned with the fourth. The skipped third issue threw me off for a few years. I finally sat down and carefully read these comics.

To my pleasant surprise, Stanley's work appears through at least the 11th issue. I'm still going over the last half of the 22-issue run.

These stories, which are often quite long and detailed, are a fascinating precursor of Stanley's 1960s work on the series Dunc 'n Loo (also with Bill Williams) and 13 Going on 18. They show that these concepts did not appear out of the blue, for their creator, in the early 1960s.

The dawn of the 1950s saw an uneasy transition in John Stanley's writing. He repressed, consciously or not, the wilder extremes of his comedic sensibility. The frantic, everywhere-at-once affect of his 1940s work was suddenly muted.

This was, I believe, a result of his duties as the creative light of the Marge's Little Lulu titles. His greatest success as a comics-maker, Lulu brought with it a certain sense of reserve.

Lulu was a big property, and more TLC and painstaking were required for the series than, arguably, for any other of the comics produced by Western Publishing for Dell.

Lulu had a creative team, as seen in this one-time-only credit listing, from the pages of the comic's 49th issue:

There are uncredited contributors to the magazine (such as editors and proof-readers). Little Lulu was not a one-man band, although the entire team's work depended on what John Stanley brought to the table, month after month.

As the main provider of content, Stanley had a remarkable amount of license. Though broad physical comedy occurs constantly in the early '50s Little Lulu, it is played dryly. The static look of Irving Tripp's artwork seems to be one important agent in this change of tone. Tripp could downplay wild action (as seen in the fifth panel of the gag page above) and make it seem as matter-of-fact as a yawn or a walk.

Though no evidence exists to support this, it feels as though editorial concerns may have influenced the toned-down feel of these still-superb stories. The Lulu pieces of 1950-1954 may be John Stanley's most-liked and best-regarded work. High-functioning, smart and loaded with compelling details of personality, setting and mood, these stories are consistently truly great work.

That same tamped-down, highly controlled sensibility flavors the contemporary Henry Aldrich stories. Though they contain constant moments of social embarrassment and personal humiliation, as found in the later, more loose-limbed Dunc and 13, their affect is calm and more subtly played.

Another theory: the failure of his late 1940s original comics creations, Peterkin Pottle and Jigger and Mooch, both bleak, dark visions of the world, might still have smarted in Stanley's memory. Perhaps he took away from those failures the idea to tone things down in his work.

Stanley never abandoned his pet themes, which, by their very nature, are dark--social struggles, status shifts, failures to fit in with the regular world, the corrupting nature of wealth. In the first half of the 1950s, he found ways to present this material without drawing much attention to it.

These themes drive John Stanley's work. Their presence, and Stanley's distinctive use of them, have been helpful in identifying stories that are, or may be, his.

Loss of status is one of the linchpins of John Stanley's world. Stanley was comics' supreme essayer of the rise and fall of status. It is the coin of his characters' realm. Who they are, and how they exist, are governed almost entirely by their social and personal status.

Stanley used status, and its gain and loss, as grounds for high comedy, low comedy, and moments of surprising compassion. His investment in his characters, on this level, is one thing that makes his work so good.

Stanley gained mastery of comedic status-shifting in his early 1950s work. It becomes the basis for all his future work. In the 1960s, status is treated in broader strokes, with a more forte tone and tempo. It still runs the world of all Stanley's characters, and drives every story he writes--even the eccentric horror and fantasy pieces of Ghost Stories and Tales From the Tomb.

One of Stanley's most protracted and painful status wars was fought in the back pages of 13 Going on Eighteen. The series' "Judy Junior" stories, which I've discussed elsewhere on this blog, are deliberate, genuinely existential tournaments of human will and the right to dignity. Each day of Jimmy Fuzzi's life is a suburban battle-of-wills to retain what little dignity and standing he possesses.

It is fascinating to find an precedent to "Judy Junior" in the backup feature for Henry Aldrich, "Homer." For three inspired stories, Stanley and Williams created a priceless set-up. Homer Brown, best friend of Henry Aldrich, is the steady date of Agnes. To see Agnes, he must encounter her little brother, Edgar. This pre-pubescent wheeler-dealer traffics in money and status.

Edgar is a genuine threat to Homer's well-being. He is, seemingly, completely amoral, and thus unpredictable. Homer is no Einstein, and what wits he does possess are compromised by his feelings for Agnes. Thus, each time he visits his girlfriend, a psychic Hawaiian Punch awaits, in Edgar's cold-hearted, cold-cash schemes.

Stanley visited this bullet-proof scenario three times, and then abandoned it. Here is this sublime trifecta of Homer vs. Edgar pieces. The first, and shortest, is from Henry Aldrich #6...

Edgar is one of Stanley's most destructive trouble figures. Like Judy Junior, of over a decade later, he seems shorn of conscience, good will towards others, and anything else that would describe a well-integrated member of society.

When he dissolves Homer's hat in a vat of foul chemicals, he simply swipes his father's chapeau, and then presents Homer with a bill for his services. The story ends with some lingering threads. There will, surely, be a scene the next time Homer calls on Agnes. Edgar feels nothing for this future hell he's created. He has his 26 cents, and a higher status than his sister's boyfriend.

The next round of Edgar v. Homer occurs in Aldrich #7:

Edgar brings Homer down to his level of dog-eat-dog survival. Homer is forced to steal from Edgar's piggy bank, in a move that further lowers his status, even though his actions can be justified in some ways. At his best, Stanley shows us moments in the lives of his characters that are simultaneous victories and defeats. This is among the most ignoble episodes in all his work.

Homer appears to have forgiven Edgar, in the interval between this story and next, published in Henry the 8th. Edgar reveals himself a master of low-ball antics. He brings Homer a world of anxiety and deflation--and makes him pay for it!

Homer sets himself up for a world of anguish from the moment he greets Edgar on the street, at story's start. Homer's attempt to make piece with his little tormentor creates a contract that Edgar can--and will--use against him, in an escalating comedy of misinformation.

In the final tier of page 5, Edgar's sociopathy is brilliantly portrayed for dark comedy:

Homer is correct to envision Edgar boiling in oil at story's end. This is, alas, the end of their battle royale. The next issue's story downplays their relationship, and even has them playing marble with concentrated food pills at story's end. The chain of events that leads to that finale is quite clever, but the tension is gone from this dark relationship.

Again, it feels like editorial input may have caused this change of plans. In its three-story arc, the status war of Homer and Edgar is an unknown moment of brilliance in John Stanley's career. There are other worthy stories in the first several issues of Henry Aldrich, and I'll share more here in the future.

I have some new posts to do here, but I didn't want to obscure anyone's chance to purchase the 1960s John Stanley Bibliography. It's priced at $4.99. Here's a PayPal payment button:

You can also buy it, bundled with the earlier 1940s Stanley bibliography, for six dollars. To do so, choose this button:

If you want to purchase only the 1940s volume, for $2.99 USD, look to your immediate right.

This link will sit here, above newer posts, until at least the end of the year. Thus, I won't have to run sales-pitches into the body of the regular posts. Please enjoy the other posts on this blog, and if you're interested to know more about the artist and his work, these resources are available. Thanks!

Given how poorly my 1960s John Stanley Bibliography has sold, I'm feeling rather discouraged about the hard work it will take to put together the 1950s volume. In the work I've done so far, if only to satisfy my own curiosity, I've made some pleasant discoveries and done some re-evaluations.

The richest vein I've struck is in the early 1950s title Henry Aldrich, which Stanley wrote for his most talented collaborator, the cartoonist Bill Williams.

As Stanley entered his most beloved period on the best-selling Marge's Little Lulu title, and just before he took up cartooning again for the eclectic Marge's Tubby spinoff, he wrote several issues of this teenage analog to Lulu and Tubby.

Stanley's Aldrich material is often surprisingly sophisticated, and the book's unusual format allowed him to experiment with story lengths. Today's offering is one of Stanley's longest regular-issue narratives: 31 pages of unfolding comedic mayhem, tinged with black humor and featuring two protagonists who never quite understand why their actions have such a strong effect on the world around them.

The untitled story's highly innocuous kitchen scene, at its start, doesn't reveal one iota of the manic escalation that hits Henry and his best bud, Homer, like the proverbial dresser-drawer-full-of-bricks...

A seasoned reader of John Stanley's Thirteen Going on Eighteen can find much to savor in this untitled story. Like the recently posted "Homer Brown" stories, this piece shows that Stanley's 1960s comedic style did not just spring out of the ether. The highly controlled world of "Little Lulu" didn't leave Stanley much breathing room. Events too wild, morbid or off-kilter wouldn't work in the "Lulu" arena.

This story was written before Stanley's remarkable series of book-length stories for the Marge's Tubby comic book. Though Stanley had written (and sometimes drawn) several longer narratives by 1950, when this story was created, he had seldom reached this level of sophistication. "Lulu Takes A Ride," from 1947, comes closest to achieving this story's sublime, patient and measured comedic escalation.

The story harkens back to two significant Stanley pieces from the New Funnies monthly anthology. This Andy Panda story from 1947 (buried within a longer, more general post) has a remarkably similar sequence in which the two protagonists attempt to return a stolen cannon by car.

This Woody Woodpecker story, also from '47, is built around assumptive misunderstanding of an innocent act that seems sinister. It, too, calls in the police, including... well, read the post and see for yourself.

Alert readers will notice the reference to Kohlkutz, the butcher--who also appears in many "Little Lulu" stories. Stanley was evidently very fond of this W. C. Fields-esque name.

Stanley had the opportunity to revisit narrative and comedic ideas time and again in the world of comic books. These mass-produced, disposable pamphlets, forgotten by most as soon as they reached their sell-by date, had a huge turnover in their readership. A good idea was most definitely worth repeating, or re-exploring.

Several such strains of a theme approached, retried, refined and perfected occur in John Stanley's work. This is one of the most spectacular realizations of a solid comedic idea in all of comics.

Stanley, at his best, keeps small, absurd ideas moving through the flow of his story. In this case, it's the boys' remembrance of a horrible fruit punch drink, made by Homer using cider vinegar. That incident keeps bobbing to the surface of the story, as Henry and Homer get enmeshed in a town-wide crisis that ends with a massive police stand-off, guns at the ready, in their own backyard:

This comedic apotheosis had no place in Little Lulu's world. It is the type of moment that modern licensed-property holders have in their worst, wake-up-screaming-and-sweaty nightmares. No corporate entity would allow their properties to be held at bay with riot guns! The freedom of neglect that Stanley, and other Western Publishing creators, enjoyed with their licensed charges, in the 1940s, '50s and '60s enabled them to make bold choices, and to introduce ideas that were far richer and more complex than the official version of Henry Aldrich, Woody Woodpecker, Howdy Doody, etc., etc.

Stanley was the only Western creator to take full advantage of this freedom, and this story is one of the richest fruits of such anonymous labor. That he also had 52 pages to fill any way he chose, with little editorial interference, allowed him to, at whim, write out a story to its natural length. This could have been a 10-page story, stripped to the essence of its plot. With 31 pages, Stanley and Williams can indulge themselves in non-essential but dazzling touches. Incidental characters who'd have no more than a "YOW" in a shorter story get to exchange significant dialogue (e..g, the napping department store employee with the mannequins; the spinster women who call the police near story's end).

The reward of this story is its leisure. It builds slowly and inexorably from a stock premise, invests it with character and stakes, and lets it come to a boil. Were Henry and Homer not so concerned about their social status, none of the events of this remarkable story would have taken place. Because their egos, and their misguided perceptions of the world, inform their thoughts and deeds, they take the hard way; their misfortune and growing confusion allows a level of character richness seldom seen in mid-20th-century comics.

John Stanley's Henry Aldrich stories are perhaps the best hidden gems of his prolific career. They are subtle, smart and understated in all the right places, and zany when zany is most needed. They're written with the same control as Stanley's concurrent "Little Lulu" stories, but they get to explore different places than most mainstream comics of their era.

Naughty Nurses and Disillusioned Drunks: Stories from Linda Lark, Registered Nurse 2, 1961

Of Mice and Mensch: Woody The Exterminator, from New Funnies 115, September 1946

A Stanley Story for Voting Day: Tubby in "Election Day," Little Lulu 39, 1950

Panda, Chicken Visit Land Down Under After Passive-Aggressive Outburst; Woodpecker Plays PI, Is Fall Guy For Evil Rich: two from New Funnies 112, 1946

Prime-Time Sitcom(ix): issue 10 of John Stanley's Thirteen Going on Eighteen

John Stanley's Tropical Nightmare Noir: The Complete Tramp Doctor

New Funnies Teachings: It's A Scary World Out There!

Weekend Plug-O-Rama

Bucolic Battles, Noxious Neighbors and Sob Sisters: Three Stories from Little Lulu "Four Color" one shot 146, 1947

A Cockeyed Cure For Well-Being: Clyde Crashcup #3, 1964: story by John Stanley, art by Irving Tripp

Something Old, Something New...

Casual Calamity Cubed: Three Stories From New Funnies 116, 1946

Running on Sheer Chutzpah: Little Lulu Four-Color One-Shot 158, 1947

Stan Lee Stories, Pt. 2: More Rip-offs from "The House of Ideas"--And A Story Starring "John Stanley"

Coming in October: the 1960s John Stanley Bibliography!

The 1960s John Stanley Bibliography is Now Available!

Stanley's Final Funny Animal Comics: "Heckle and Jeckle" from New Terrytoons 4, 1969

"Homer"-- A Fascinating Forecast of John Stanley's 1960s Work, One Decade Early

Permalink for The John Stanley Bibliography E-Book Purchases

Dressmaker's Dummy Leads Teenage Pals Into Hitchcockian Screwball Nightmare: 31-page story from Henry Aldrich 4, 1951