Animal Narratives in Graphic Novels

Definition

A thriving, historically diverse genre of graphic novels, comic books, and newspaper comic strips, the funny animal genre features anthropomorphic animal characters who provide broadly comic, frequently satirical commentaries on human nature. Often misunderstood as simplistic or juvenile, such comics frequently tackle themes of sociopolitical conflict, ethnic difference, and ideological complexity.

Introduction

The funny animal genre represents a seminal tradition that pervades every form of graphic narrative featuring personified animals as endearingly cute innocents or morally ambiguous allegories and stories centered on slapstick farce, witty screwball or situation comedy, sweet romantic escapades, or outlandish adventures involving exotic locales and extreme stereotyping. Gravely existential animal fables are also popular. Early auteurs brought incredible narrative and thematic sophistication to key characters who migrated back and forth between newspaper funnies, movie screens, comic books, and, later, television. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, treasuries began to collect and republish these milestone works, including George Herriman’s Dadaist Krazy Kat (1913-1944), Carl Barks’s Disney comics (1901–2000), and Walt Kelly’s beautifully rendered woodland satires in Pogo (1948-1975). In the turbulent 1960s underground comics scene, the vulgarity of countercultural deconstructions such as Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, Dan O’Neill’s notorious Disney parodies, and Chester Crill and Robert Armstrong’s Mickey Rat broke ground for more ambitious anthropomorphic experiments such as Dave Sim’s Cerebus and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. In the earliest forms of comic art, the funny animal mode encompasses a narrative tradition as resilient and resonant as superhero or fantasy genres.

Origin of the Species

The funny animal mode has roots in several interconnected milieu. Foremost are the intensely personal connections to cuddly stuffed playmates and holiday fantasies involving the Easter Bunny or other anthropomorphized animals of childhood. Early learning texts create didactic lessons about the differences and diversity of life through endearing animal characters. In such works, our intense childish love for this virtual fusion of human/beast perspectives embraces the bold exoticism of zoo animals such as elephants, the familiarity of barnyard animals such as horses, the companionship of domesticated creatures such as dogs, and even the danger or irritation of household pests such as rats.

More serious animal parables and satires often embrace the anthropomorphic contrast between human and beast to critique the failings, abuses, and vices of supposedly superior, enlightened beings. From Aesop’s fables and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Richard Adams’s Watership Down, works using such cautionary strategies inform numerous graphic novels, including Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3, and Matt Dembicki’s Trickster. In total, however, anthropomorphic graphic novels find their most immediate referents in newspaper strips, Hollywood animated cartoons, and the funny animal comic book boom of the late 1950s.

Several of the most influential funny animal texts originated in newspaper strips and pamphlet comic books. Later reprinted in book-length compilations, these texts represent the first serious collections of otherwise serial, ephemeral material, and the sense of rediscovery and reevaluation attached to them remains one of the most exciting elements of graphic novel studies. Perhaps the most important contribution to preserving endangered funny animal comics has been Fantagraphics Books’ effort to collect the complete run of Herriman’s Krazy Kat in volume form. These uniform editions build upon earlier efforts by past publishers to make the entire Krazy Kat oeuvre available for twenty-first-century readers.

Boom and Barks

Much funny animal art derives from the smooth fusion of sequential formats and repurposed characters from animated cartoons. Young readers’ periodicals brimmed with animal tales, and by the mid-twentieth century, comics marketed to very young or preliterate children began to feature characters from animated films. Even lesser Hollywood characters, including Barney Bear, Felix the Cat, and Mighty Mouse, found great success as comic book heroes.

The preeminent titles, in both sales and quality, were Dell Comics’ Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and Four Color Comics. Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories began its run in 1940 as a successor to the innovative Mickey Mouse Magazine and soon became synonymous with middle-class children’s culture. Featuring Disney’s pantheon of animal icons, the series remains one of the longest-running titles in American history, reaching well over six hundred issues by 2000. Dell’s other landmark series, Four Color Comics, ran for over thirteen hundred issues between 1939 and 1962. Both series enjoyed enormous popularity and greatly influenced later funny animal comics. Several notable artists worked for these publications, including long-time Mickey Mouse artist Floyd Gottfredson and early Donald Duck designer Al Taliaferro. Artists Carl Barks and Walt Kelly, in particular, would strongly influence the genre.

A former Disney animator, Barks worked for Four ColorComics and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, producing numerous ten-page slapstick stories between 1943 and 1965 and many book-length FourColor one-shot adventures. He also created stories for the comic book Uncle Scrooge. In addition to creating Scrooge McDuck, Barks introduced such Disney characters as Gladstone Gander, Gyro Gearloose, Magica De Spell, and the Beagle Boys. Barks fashioned compelling tales of misanthropic adventure, imperialist exploration, and cunning satire, developing his Duckberg stories as microcosmic morality plays in which, in the oldest traditions of animal parables, he lambasted ignorance, arrogance, and affectation and celebrated the virtues of intellect, industry, and camaraderie.

The anthropomorphic works of Kelly, another former Disney animator, are even more richly conflicted in their mixture of funny animal themes, deft comedy, and bold political commentary. Unlike Barks, Kelly published his comics in newspapers and volumes reminiscent of later graphic novels. More than thirty such volumes, collections of his Pogo strips, were published between 1951 and 1976. Kelly’s work is especially known for its idiosyncratic dialogue. Throughout his Pogo stories, his creatures speak, sing, and kvetch in a fascinating gumbo of Southern dialects, figurative metaphors, and half-baked malapropisms that continue to delight juvenile and adult readers. Pogo originally featured a nostalgic mixture of ethnic comedy, minstrel routines, and rube humor. Still, the series evolved into one of the most poignantly tolerant and creatively uncompromising works in graphic novel history. Uniquely political in its time, Kelly’s work openly condemned McCarthyism, promoted environmental responsibility, and invoked liberal attitudes with a zesty diversity, grassroots spirit, and unabashed joy.

Bad Animals: Underground and Alternative Press

Funny animal comics also inspired some of the most vehemently revolutionary graphic narratives ever conceived. Underground comics creators Harvey Pekar, Crumb, O’Neill, and Spiegelman each credit the genre as a formative influence on their use of comic art as a countercultural weapon against conformity, boredom, and repression. In particular, Crumb’s Fritz the Cat features lewd behaviors involving illicit sex, drug use, and even terrorist activities that helped to define the scandalously deconstructive sensibilities of adult and underground comics for decades. The underground press spawned genre-bending comics magazines such as FunnyAminals, which simultaneously lauded the masterworks of Herriman, Barks, and Kelly while paving the way for more ambiguously politicized comics such as Maus, Cerebus, and Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The most belabored of the underground’s funny animal protests involved the legal battle over O’Neill’s unsanctioned use of trademarked characters in his Air Pirates Funnies. The decade-long controversy provided evocative proof of the genre’s importance as a testing ground for trademarked icons and its seditious potential in the hands of renegade artists.

In the 1970s and 1980s, small press anthologies such as Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW magazine, Antarctic Press’s Albedo, and Fantagraphics Books’ Critters and Adventures of Captain Jack revised funny animal comics in edgy New Wave scenarios. Originally published as pull-out pamphlets in RAW, Spiegelman’s Maus was compiled as two graphic novels published in 1986 and 1991. The complete memoir received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1992. Spiegelman’s Holocaust tale deploys the anthropomorphic conceit of German cats and Jewish mice to universalize his family history, and his awareness of the limitations of the animal metaphor raises the tensions of the funny animal genre with unparalleled gravitas.

Other animal comics of the 1980s were similarly ambitious in scope and content. Early Fantagraphics anthologies featured the first installments of Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, a long-running samurai series with an anthropomorphic rabbit protagonist. Sim’s Cerebus, originally conceived as an homage to the sword and sorcery genre, was first published in 1977. Over time, the story evolved into a unique excoriation of every conceivable establishmentarian theme in comics, politics, and religion, self-consciously exploding the notion of sweet animal protagonists.

The 1980s saw anthropomorphism take on serious concerns of gender and sexuality. Funny animal comics began to gain sexual relevance when a minor anthropomorphic character from an underground sex anthology became the protagonist of a new series, Kate Worley and Reed Waller’s Omaha the Cat Dancer. The series features the explicit sexual escapades of a feline, exotic dancer, and her associates and received critical attention for its treatment of social and political issues related to sexuality. Alternative comics such as Shary Flenniken’s Trots similarly emphasize sexual politics, and well-developed themes of anthropomorphic eroticism and animal sensuality appear in later works such as Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido’s Blacksad.

New Model Animals

In the twenty-first century, funny animal narratives migrated across astonishing artistic terrains. The autobiographical candor of Maus and Cerebus has been echoed in works by ambitious talents such as Jason, whose experiments with anthropomorphic malaise include I Killed Adolf Hitler (2006) and Isle of 100,000 Graves (2011). French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim has developed uniquely personal, funny animal graphic novels such as The Spiffy Adventures of McConey and the series Dungeon, coauthored with Joann Sfar beginning in 1998. The original innocence of traditional funny animal comics fuels preteen works such as Sara Varon’s bittersweet Sweaterweather & Other Short Stories (2003), Robot Dreams (2007), Odd Duck (2013), and President Squid (2016) and Frank Cammuso’s Maxx Hamm, Fairy Tale Detective (2005). More raucous young-adult comedies include Steve Purcell’s Sam and Max, first published in 1987, and Pepo’s Condorito, first published in 1949. Mature alternatives such as Tony Millionaire’s Maakies, a comic strip that has been collected in numerous volumes since 1994, and Martin Kellerman’s Rocky (1999), about a reprobate but lovable canine reminiscent of Fritz the Cat, explore the decadence and profligacy that began with the Tijuana bibles and continued through the underground period. Indian American illustrator, cartoonist, and artist Nidhi Chanani left her career in nonprofit work to pursue her passion for drawing. In 2009, she began a three-year practice she called Every Day Love, illustrating one small work every day, mostly of animals, to polish her graphic novel skills. She published her first graphic novel Pashmina, in 2017, followed by Jukebox (2021) and her Shark Princess series, including Shark Princess (2022), Shark Princess: Shark Party (2023), and Shark Princess: Surfin' Sharks (2024). As an early twenty-first-century mode of comic art, anthropomorphism continues to revise previous traditions of cuteness and comedy while pressing into deeper and occasionally dangerous habitats.

Impact

Funny animal comics have greatly influenced the field of comic studies, providing a wealth of thematic issues for analysis and interpretation. One primary concern is the depth or extremity of animalistic transformation in such narratives. Sometimes, the principal metaphor or animal disguise is nearly transparent, little more than a mask. Such characters appear almost completely human except for a thin bestial veneer involving fur, wings, scales, or tails. In most cases, however, funny animals represent a balanced mixture of human and bestial features. Animals speak, act, and feel in human terms rather than as people who have been retrofitted with slight or symbolic animal tropes. This mode can lead to contradictions, as in volume 2 of Maus, in which Spiegelman breaks from the narrative to discuss the thematic difficulty of introducing actual feline pets into his cat-and-mouse metaphor. Another consideration involves whether funny animals interact with actual humans or if they populate their closed anthropomorphic worlds. Various comics creators have explored these two possibilities, and both narratives have explored the meaning of humanity and humankind’s place in the world. The funny animal persists as one of the comics industry’s most familiar and malleable traditions, urging creators and readers to use graphic novels and their brethren to examine their tenuous grasp on humanity.

Bibliography

Alaniz, José. "Animals in Graphic Narrative." The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies, Oxford University Press, 2020. pp. 326-334.

Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Gifford, Denis. The International Book of Comics. Rev. ed. Hamlyn, 1990.

Haldule, Tej. "More Human Than Humans: Exploring Animals In Graphic Novels." The Curious Reader, 16 Aug. 2019, www.thecuriousreader.in/features/animals-in-graphic-novels. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Keen, Suzanne. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 135-155. doi.org/10.1353/sub.2011.0003.

Varis, Essi. "Review of Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives." Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 3 no. 1, 2019, Project MUSE, p. 114-117. doi.org/10.1353/ink.2019.0006.