238 FUNNY ANIMAL COMICS
comic books. In his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Fredric Wertham estimated
that what he called “harmless animal comics” like Donald Duck , Mickey Mouse , Te r r y -
toons , Bugs Bunny , and Super Duck , and other comics containing no harmful material,
amounted to only 10–20 percent of the market. He warned that children were often
secretly reading very diff erent kinds of comic books that their parents did not know
about. Even in the case of funny animal comics, Wertham cautioned in passing that
some included violent stories, advertisements for weapons, and racist ridicule.
Perhaps the greatest funny animal comic, Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” began in Animal Comics
in 1942. (Th e previous year Kelly, a Disney animator, took a leave of absence during
the great Disney animators’ strike and never returned to the studio.) By 1946, Albert
the Alligator & Pogo Possum had their own comic book. In 1949, Pogo became a daily
newspaper comic strip, where it soon won lasting fame for occasionally incorporat-
ing contemporary political issues into its stories, and for expertly caricaturing Senator
Joseph McCarthy as a dangerous bobcat. Th e Pogo strip balanced anti-McCarthy
strips with anticommunist stories. Th e main attractions of this beautifully drawn strip
included inspired nonsense, whimsy, slapstick, and delightful wordplay.
When compared with Barks and Kelly, the shortcomings of some other funny ani-
mal cartoonists of the 1940s and 1950s become apparent. Al Fago’s stories about “Neddy”
for Frisky Fables were charming, but most readers seemed to outgrow them by around the
time that they were old enough to attend kindergarten. Ernie Hart’s Marmaduke Mouse
and Egbert were, especially in the beginning, solidly drawn and reasonably funny, but
lacked a convincing sense of action and character. Art Bartsch’s adventures of “Mighty
Mouse” had imagination, but were brought back to earth by merely functional inking.
Th e new industry of animated children’s television shows faced the same kinds
of tight deadlines and tiny budgets as the early fi lm animation studios had faced,
and turned, like them, to simply-drawn funny animal characters and other ways to
economize. Jay Ward and Alexander Anderson Jr.’s “Crusader Rabbit” fi rst appeared on
television in 1948 and in two comic books in 1956 and 1957. Later, Ward teamed up
with Bill Scott and recycled and improved on the Crusader Rabbit formula with a new
show about a fl ying squirrel and a moose, Rocky and his Friends , which debuted in 1959.
Rocky and Bullwinkle stood out from all other animated cartoons of that period by
striking both children and adults as consistently funny and intelligent.
Th e high cost of production was killing the cartoon shorts that the studios had created
for movie theaters. Two animators from MGM, William Hanna and Joe Barbera, the
creators of “ Tom and Jerry,” left to form their own animation studio aimed at creating
cartoons for television. Th eir fi rst show was Ruff and Reddy , starring a cartoon cat and
dog, which premiered in 1957. Th ey went on to create many successful animated chil-
dren’s shows, beginning with several more with animal casts: Th e Huckleberry Hound
Show and Quick Draw McGraw. Th e Hanna-Barbera characters were licensed to comic
book publishers, beginning with Ruff and Reddy in 1958.
Th e rise of the underground “ comix ” movement in the late 1960s has often been por-
trayed as an attempt to revive the broken lineage of horror comics that disappeared when
