FUNNY ANIMAL COMICS 237
to fl ood the market with numerous titles in whatever genre was selling well. Timely
Comics’ editor, former Fleischer Studios animator Vince Fago, developed new funny
animal titles that, for a time, sold as well as the company’s superhero comics. Th eir
inconsequential “Ziggy Pig” and “Silly Seal” may have been the fi rst funny animal
characters created specifi cally for comic books. Th e most successful of Timely’s funny
animal characters, “Super Rabbit,” was created in 1943 and quickly won his own comic
book which lasted from 1943 to 1948. Because funny animal comics were simpler to
draw, Timely paid the cartoonists a lower page-rate for funny animal comics than for
superhero comics.
In 1942, Timely made its fi rst deal to license someone else’s characters, arranging to
publish Paul Terry’s Terry-toons , starring “Mighty Mouse,” “Gandy Goose,” and other
characters. Paul Terry had been one of the fi rst animators in the business, and suc-
ceeded in producing a high volume of cartoons, with his series on “Farmer Al Falfa” and
Aesop’s Fables , in the 1920s.
National Comics (the forerunner of DC ) added a funny animal title in 1944 with
Funny Stuff , edited by Sheldon Mayer, and in 1945 published Real Screen Comics ,
which used Columbia Pictures’ cartoon stars “Th e Fox and the Crow” and was drawn
by moonlighting animators. As funny animals continued to grow in popularity, DC
converted its superhero comic books Leading Comics and Comic Cavalcade into funny
animal comics in 1945 and 1949, respectively.
During World War II, the covers of animal comics, like the covers of the superhero
comics, sometimes had patriotic and military themes. Timely titles showed this most
dramatically, with the animals bringing Hitler and Tojo to court to be tried for “war
guilt crimes” ( Super Rabbit #1, Fall, 1943) or suspending Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo
over hungry sharks ( Terry-toons #7, April, 1943.) Funny animal comics, especially Dell’s,
sometimes appealed on their covers for children to purchase war bonds and stamps for
victory or waved the American fl ag.
Carl Barks , by universal acclaim, was the most important cartoonist in the funny
animal comic book genre. He had worked as an in-betweener and then in the story
department at Disney’s animation studio when, in 1942, he was assigned to draw the
fi rst Donald Duck comic book that consisted of original material, as opposed to reprints
of Al Taliaferro’s gag-a-day Donald Duck comic strip. Later that year he got a job draw-
ing 10-page Donald Duck stories for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories , and continued to
write and draw duck stories for the next two decades until his retirement. Th anks pri-
marily to Barks’s Donald Duck stories, sales of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories reached
two to three million copies per monthly issue, making it the most popular comic book
ever published. Barks invented Uncle Scrooge, and some of his most-loved stories
were adventures that appeared under that title, where the ducks often appeared as tiny
silhouettes within various large and richly-drawn landscapes. Barks was paid by the
page, at rates which did not refl ect the commercial value of his work.
When American comic books were at the peak of their circulation and power in the
1940s and early 1950s, most people thought of funny animals when they thought of
