242 FUNNY ANIMAL COMICS
characters, and has also had an animated television series and a long-running comic
book series.
Th e history of funny animals over the course of the last century endlessly demonstrates
that the worlds of animated cartoons and printed comics have been deeply intertwined.
As a fi nal example, Jim Woodring, after an unhappy career as an animator in the 1980s,
moved to creating small-circulation comic books. He calls Frank, his best-known character
(from Th e Frank Book ), a “general anthropomorph” not representing any particular
species. Frank lives in a colorful and tasty-looking universe that appears deeply rooted
in cartooning traditions but his stories communicate the anxiety of trying to improvise
appropriate responses to relentlessly unfamiliar situations. Frank represents both a wealth
of inherited cultural resources and a world of untapped possibilities, the current state of
funny animal comics.
Selected Bibliography: Andrae, Th omas. Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book:
Unm asking the Myth of Modernity. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006;
Crumb, R., and Peter Poplaski. Th e R. Crumb Handbook. London: MQ Publications,
2005; Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist
Ideology in the Disney Comic. New York: International General, 1975.
L e o n a r d R i f a s
