FUNNY ANIMAL COMICS 239
the industry adopted the Comics Code in 1954. Th e central fi gure in that movement,
though, grew up loving funny animal comic books, not horror (or superhero) comics.
R. Crumb’s favorite comic books when growing up in the late 1940s to early 1950s
included Walt Disney’s Donald Duck , Terry-toons , Super Duck , Walter Lantz’s New Fun-
nies , Pogo Possum , Coo Coo Comics , and Heckle and Jeckle Comics (and the stories of Little
Lulu , featuring humans but drawn in a simplifi ed style). He and his brother Charles
were, in his words, “deeply into Carl Barks, one of the rare cartoonists to combine great
art with great storytelling” (Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 244). Crumb had his fi rst suc-
cesses with his character Fritz the Cat, and continued to draw various funny animal
comic book stories through much of his career.
In accord with underground comix’s larger mission of exercising absolute freedom
of expression, a group of underground cartoonists led by Dan O’Neill showed Disney’s
characters having sex and using drugs in the comic book series Mickey Mouse Meets
the Air Pirates (1971). Th e comix artists claimed that they were exercising their legal
right to parody Disney’s characters. Th e Supreme Court ruled against them. Other
comix artists who made notable use of Disney characters include Rick Griffi n, Victor
Moscoso, and Joel Beck. Comix artists who made regular use of the funny animal tradi-
tion include Kim Deitch (“Waldo the Cat”), Jay Lynch (“Nard n Pat”), Gilbert Shelton
(“Wonder Warthog,” “Fat Freddy’s Cat”), Robert Williams (“Coochie Cootie”), and
others.
Th e heyday of underground comix was a period of worldwide political upheaval.
A lively and controversial polemic written in Chile, Ariel Dorfman and Armand
Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (fi rst
published in 1971) violated the taboo against looking for political meanings in “pure
entertainment” created for children. Th ey noted that cartoon animals, “exempt from the
vicissitudes of history and politics, [.. .] are a convenient symbol of a world beyond
socio-economic realities, and the animal characters can represent ordinary human
types, common to all classes, countries and epochs” (146). Th ey challenged the illusory
innocence of these stories in the context of a struggle for Chile’s future which they saw
would be decided not only by the political battles over information, but also in cultural
struggles over entertainment.
Decades earlier, a Chilean cartoonist, René Pepo Ríos, in response to Disney’s creation
of a small and weak airplane to represent his nation in the 1942 propaganda cartoon
Saludos Amigos , created his own national symbol — Condorito, an anthropomorphic
condor (1949). Despite these nationalistic origins, Condorito has become very popular
throughout Latin America.
After the collapse of underground comix in 1974, experiments in low-circulation,
black-and-white comic book format continued. Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark
began in 1977 as a self-published parody of Conan the Barbarian with an aardvark
in the main role. Stan Sakai was inspired by Cerebus to create a long-running comic
with an entire cast of funny animal characters, Usagi Yojimbo , an historical fi ction comic
about a samurai bunny in 17th-century Japan, which appeared in 1984. Th e black and
