In Search of an Elusive Good Rabbit Artist

When it comes to sharing age-old comics that only registers in the memory of old-school comic readers, there's the borderline legal impetus to share that joy by posting scans of some notable short stories, like The Horrors of it All,  Four Color Shadows, Big Blog Comics, Pappy's Golden Age, and recently, the defunct Looney Comics of Matthew Hunter who started his blog to share some Looney Tunes comics with his opinions on them.

For the most part, most of the Warner Bros. Comics had sub-par art and stiff off-model characters.  But there was one exception.  In the few Looney Tunes comics that happened to fall in my hands, there was always one story that seemed to be slightly above average than the others.

For some reason, Elmer's line of "That's my Gwandfather you're punching!"
is endearably funny to me.

A long time ago (circa 2016), Mike Sterling made the claim that there never was a “Good Rabbit Artist” and the reason Carl Barks comics was fondly remembered while Warner Bros. Comics weren’t.  For the longest time, this confused me, since I thought this was the elusive artist that'd fit the profile.

It's unusual for Bugs to build up to trickery, rather than just bulldoze his way
into forcing others into whatever reality he deems plausible.

Nowadays, we'd recognize Bugs' tactics as gaslighting,
but at the time, I thought it was typical trickster tactics.

I started doing some research, but absent a name, I had no way of identifying him.  By process of elimination, I knew he wasn't Ed Volke, Pete Alvarado, Chase Craig, Roger Armstrong, Tom McKimson or Charles McKimson [no relation?].

It was only by going through the Comics Database that I found this elusive clean line artstyle showcasing Bugs Bunny with highly defined buck teeth than usual was most likely Phil de Lara, who also did the Porky Pig and Daffy Duck comics in the same issues.  The Bugs Bunny comics were also 10 pages long, which gave rise to the allusion that these were higher quality material, especially since the shorter comics weren’t as strong.

He was quite the prolific artist, working in animation, for both Warner Bros. and Walt Disney, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Chip & Dale and Woody Woodpecker.

My enthusiasm upon finding these comics was dampened upon actually seeing them all at once.  One factor that comes up is that the Warner Bros. Comics bear little resemblance to the cartoons that inspired them.  The majority of the Bugs Bunny comics had Bugs be on a frenemy terms with Elmer, and there were plots involving cursed idols, running across crooks, and casual racism which would make reprinting such stories a problem.

As with any adaptation of licensed products, there was a tendency to misunderstand the allure of the characters, grafting known marketable traits onto new properties that were known to work.  Somewhat similar to the Weekday episodes of The Real Ghostbusters where the team temporarily branched out into Crimebusters, cracking down on criminals.  Not exactly the same as tracking down and analyzing ghosts, which made the team more like cops than anything, which wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing anyways!

The difference between the nameless comics and the Carl Barks classics is that for all of Phil de Lara's skills, he worked off someone else's anonymous script.  If given the chance, could he have used his imagination to create something that could've expanded on the nature of the Warner Bros. cartoons?  We may never know.

There's no animal such as a pip-squeak, but if there were, would it behave any differently from how Elmer portrayed one here?

I normally would’ve ended this post here had I not in my searches come across this otherwise unremarkable story from 1957 where Bugs encounters Elmer on the docks in an inconspicuous disguise and WAITAMINIT.

That steamboat with cargo looks awfully familiar...

In fact, this whole setup is directly lifted off from The Crab with the Golden Claws, which was published in 1947, a full decade later, basically summarizing a 48-page comic classic in under 10 pages.

For any American ignorant of Tintin, this would be another unremarkable story, but for any comic connoisseurs in the know, this would be deliberate plagiarism, or at the very least, an indirect homage.

One other fault with these Warner Bros. comics is that the ending can be abrupt and with a somewhat unsatisfying joke, even for a condensed 10-page comic like this one.  As such, it seems we won't be seeing a collection of Phil De Lara's works anytime soon.

Old-School Influences

One of the things I enjoy doing is finding certain influences that sprung from certain comics.  Some of them are obvious ripoffs.  Others are more subtle about it.  And others can be downright obscure.  The fun comes from finding connections, and how they wound up creating the building blocks to what would later become compulsive reading material.  And when you dig further back, those influences become even more obvious.

Comics are rife with stealing material from each other and other forms of media, which makes it somewhat easier for me.  One of the first instances was reading the history of Andre the Giant.

Until Ultimate Muscle (Kinnikuman) showed up, I had practically no interest in Wrestling.  (I still don't for live-action), but ironically enough, enjoy reading Wrestling history comics.  And Andre certainly made a big splash in Japan, who expressed their fondness with displaying larger-than-life characters in their entertainment. 



But it wasn't just the use of overly exaggerated bulky antagonists that was utilized.  What surprised me was finding out that within the macho portrayal of Wrestling, there were stories of fights between good and evil played up to lofty heights to garner audience attention.  So many of the tropes that are so inherent in Wrestling apply to a lot of Manga.  From the over-the-top acting to gritting through the pain of hurtful cheap tactics, to the taunting between two rivals before the big game, to the miraculous comeback to the tragic backstory reveal.

This is especially prominent in Sports Manga, but can also apply to Shonen rivals, Tournament arcs, and everything in between.  But sometimes the influence can be less overt.  Take this page from the early translation of Battle Angel Alita for instance:

This page in particular always stood out for me, because that piece of narrative insight in the second half of that textbox never shows up anywhere else ever again.  I always wondered why it was presented this way.  Then, out of morbid curiosity, I checked the recent Kodansha translation, which did away with the superfluous additive text.

I haven't been much of a fan of the latest translations, since they're notoriously dumbed down and more literal than natural modes of speech.  But a look at another Manga property showed where the previous insertion might have come from.

Every episode of Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro ends with a chorus of crickets saying "GE GE GE GE GE" in thanks of Kitaro.

It's a little annoying, but it's a note that the story is over.  When you see something enough times, it lodges itself in your head, and I suspect that the original translator might've taken influence from this old-school Manga and inserted the extra bit as a reference point to explain the need for transitioning from a girl's inner monologue to the sky city's tubes.

It is a difficult thing to make a badass character have an air of innocence, and yet, Alita seamlessly manages to pull it off.  The only American examples I can think of are Horridus from Savage Dragon and Cassandra Cain of Batgirl fame.  Yet, for as much as she's an original (each book was radically different from each other), she's actually the combination of multiple factors.  And to explain that, I'm going to have to delve into some spoilers for the third sequel version of the series - the Mars Chronicles, which quite frankly, are the least interesting so far.

There's potentially spoilery material coming up, so if you want to remain blissfully ignorant, stop right here, and ignore everything after the cut.

Influences upon THEY

It's been awhile since my last update, but I managed to add some more chapters to my current alternate project, This is THEY.  The link I gave for the 1st chapter was somewhat bugged, so here's the correct address:

Some of the references and influences may seem obvious to devoted readers of Newspaper Comics and Cult Movies, but there's a few lines I stole - sorry, plagiarized - I mean, borrowed to bolster my story.  The best way to ensure that your inspirations aren't easily traced is to use sources that are likely to be forgotten ages ago.  And here I am showing my secrets to everyone.

The current arc, Sweet Sick Teen, (and yes, all planned future titles are intended puns) devotes attention on a surprise pregnancy on a teenager known only as "The Girl", whose appearance is left deliberately vague.  Her sudden condition has an unintended side effect of emanating an unbearable fishy smell, which she can't stand, but neither can anybody else.  One classmate even remarks, “Did somebody hide garlic squid with mango and banana in the ceiling again?”, which is a nod-out to Gordon Korman's The Twinkie Squad.

Later, when the Girl is forced to go to the Doctor for a diagnosis, this exchange occurs:

“You can’t leave just yet.  Not until the Doctor’s gotten a good look at you.”
“But you’ve already done all the prodding and testing and whatnot.”
“It’s bad form to leave without a second opinion.”
“Meaning... that there’s a fair chance that I MIGHT not be pregnant?”, she said with a smidgen of hope.
“Oh, you’re preggers for sure, no doubt about that.  Just wait a few minutes.  The Doctor should be along shortly.”

(...)

She’d barely had time to cross her arms and roll her eyes at the unresponsive blank screen before the Clinic door opened.  A man wearing a surgical mask came in out of breath, either from running, or from the Girl’s scent.  He drew closer at the Girl, took a furtive look, poked her stomach with a solitary finger, then through a strangled voice, said, “Yeah, she’s pregnant alright.”  Then ran out the door with nary another word.

“There we go.  You can go home now.”

Later, the Girl finds out to her displeasure that she can't simply abort the baby without running into potential trouble.  It's not so much the forced pregnancy that bugs her, but having to live with the smell.  So she decides to take care of it by going someplace that'll definitely take care of this little problem - the fabled City of Lies, where untruths spoken often enough become true.

Fun fact - the three obstacles set up before the Girl's entrance into the City of Lies weren't included in my first draft.  The first obstacle, the Gravity Wells was originally intended to be used to show her way to school, but I felt that would wind up slowing the opening down too much, and didn't want to waste it, so I relocated it elsewhere.  The 2nd obstacle - Memory Bane, is a combination of all the short-term memory losses into one.  Along the way, she encounters a Tattooed Man with elaborate designs that's a cross between Memento and Prison Break.  An early encounter with getting a crowd of curious followers to stop following her brings the following dialogue:

“Crowd can look intimidating at first, but they’re remarkably easy to control.  They all want someone to tell them what to do.”  Then he spoke up in a booming voice.  “Alright, listen up!  Put your right finger in your right ear!”
“NOW WHAT??” the crowd roared back in unison.
“Put your left finger in your left ear!”
“NOW WHAT??”
“Stand on one leg!”
“WHAT??”  The crowd asked.  “WHAT?  WHAT??”
“There, that’ll hold them for awhile.”
“Aw, I wanted to have a crowd do my bidding.”
“You wouldn’t have been able to handle it.”
“What, you don’t think I’m capable?  I’m sure I could do it.”
“I’ve seen it happen before - overconfident leaders who think they can rule a crowd, only to have the crowd overwhelm their ability to control it.”
“And what makes you think I wasn’t good enough??”
“If you truly were worthy, you wouldn’t have lost your train of thought in the first place.”

She had nothing to say to that.  The only retort she could think up was, “I blame you.”

If nothing else, I can hardly be faulted for wanting to use universal truths.

While in the midst of Memory Bane, people can only recall at least three pieces of information at a time.  While the obvious influence would be Memento, the major source of inspiration was the 6th storyline of  Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean, Jail House Lock!  Which, in turn, was inspired by Memento.  Go figure.

What I intend to do with my story is to influence new ways of thinking.  (There are very few narratives that are voiced in the Second Person)  And the best way to do so is by telling a story, and letting audiences figure it out themselves.  While in Memory Bane, there are little details that upon a second reading, make more sense.  I tried my best to sprinkle copious amounts of clues throughout, but worried that in my haste to clarify things, I might've dumbed down the material, or put off the reveal for too long.  (No, I'm not going to tell you what it is, read for yourself)

December's New Year

Closing out the year is the last batch of BC's letters and poems, which, surprisingly enough, revolving around Christmastime are pretty sparse.

I suppose that once Johnny Hart got more invested in Christianity, he devoted more attention towards making symbolic comics than clever monological rhymes or back-n-forth transcripts.


Looking over the results, the playing field is pretty sparse, so here's a bunch of miscellaneous letters & poems I was unable to properly categorize.

While going through my collection, I came across an April strip that I missed, because I was confused about when to properly show it.

Then there was the fact that sometimes Peter's Pen-pal could be maddening vague in his responses.


Then there was usage of innovation to spice up some letters.  Note the lack of a Night scene below.

Soon, they started using anachronistic technology that years later, actually got an update.



Then there was a reference to the Epic BC storyline surrounding the fact that we never actually knew what the invisible responder across the water actually looked like.

That lack of response could be attributed to a revolving door of various responders, depending on who bothered to answer the mysterious letters coming across the ocean.

There were several strips revolving around Columbus Day that would've been better served around October, but given the amount of controversy surrounding the man, felt unsure about devoting further attention towards the issue.

Particularly since the second comic repeated an earlier joke.  That's one small world there.

This one plays around with the format somewhat, by having the letter-writing action take place in the throwaway panel, and the return letter taking up the bulk of the strip.

This is probably the wordiest letter Peter's ever written, full of name-dropping characters.

Moving onto the poetry angle, here's a quick ditty of Wily's numerous phobias.

There were several poems where Wily's view of women was less than remarkable, and felt out of place during Valentine's and Mother's Day, when such celebratory holidays would've felt out of place.


Then there's this, which has rose-coloured nostalgia for times of old, which probably never really existed.

Of all of Wily's poems, this one has what I consider to be a fairly effective punchline, even though it could be considered triggering to some people.