Before The Bear came to stay at Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact, there was Booby Bear hanging out with Perky Penguin. For extra Fun - the strip was drawn (and written?) by Jim Mooney. Mooney is one of those guys who seemed "fresh" enough to my friends and i back in the '60s & '70s that we never realized just how long he'd been around in comics. These come to us from 1946 and he'd already been drawing comics for a half dozen years by then.
Perky Penguin And Booby Bear was a short feature, only two pages per. It started running in the second year (the first full year) of TCoF&F, and had 9 episodes that year. (#6 is my fave) Here are the first year's worth of the strip -
As noted above, my fave for this year is watching Jim Mooney getting meta and having fun with 'reality' almost 75 years ago...
Over the next few years, Perky & Booby returned for another 9 or 10 strips (plus one more a decade later, but that was a reprint). Booby Bear may have been there before The Bear, but he wasn't there nearly as long. Perhaps because Mooney was doing a lot of work for DC and proto-Marvel at the time. He was drawing Captain America and Batman & Robin, among others - so he did get pretty busy. Or maybe they just found out what else Jim liked to draw, and figured he wasn't a good fit. (Probably not that last one)
Or maybe somebody realized that Perky Booby wasn't a great combo for a Catholic comic? (And Jim walked off laughing at how long he got away with it?)
The World may never know...
Perky Penguin And Booby Bear was a short feature, only two pages per. It started running in the second year (the first full year) of TCoF&F, and had 9 episodes that year. (#6 is my fave) Here are the first year's worth of the strip -
As noted above, my fave for this year is watching Jim Mooney getting meta and having fun with 'reality' almost 75 years ago...
Over the next few years, Perky & Booby returned for another 9 or 10 strips (plus one more a decade later, but that was a reprint). Booby Bear may have been there before The Bear, but he wasn't there nearly as long. Perhaps because Mooney was doing a lot of work for DC and proto-Marvel at the time. He was drawing Captain America and Batman & Robin, among others - so he did get pretty busy. Or maybe they just found out what else Jim liked to draw, and figured he wasn't a good fit. (Probably not that last one)
Or maybe somebody realized that Perky Booby wasn't a great combo for a Catholic comic? (And Jim walked off laughing at how long he got away with it?)
The World may never know...
page art by Jim Mooney from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v2 #s 1-4, 6, 8, 16, 17, & 19 (1946, 1947)
Yeah... Jim Mooney in the sevenities... like Gene Colan he was seemingly down with the weirder end of Marvel... Mike Ploog was all right, but I prefer Mooney's run MAN-THING... almost like Jack Kamen at EC in its aesthetic...
ReplyDeleteNice-looking funny animal work here
as well. Not the most incredible stories, but passable enough. Surprisingly casual in their violence in places, though, hence I'm a little surprised they passed the mustard for a school--and a religious school at that--periodical.
Colan was another one i really loved.
ReplyDeleteY'know - i don't think he's been on the blog yet. I know i pulled some of those old stories he did that were published from pencils, no inks. But they're sitting in the heap untouched.
Just looked - i'm wrong. I did run one Colan story; but it's a golden age piece, before he worked out his later cool stylings.
I agree - i prefer Mooney's Man-Thing; and i prefer Ploog's work elsewhere to his Man-Thing, too.
Good note on the Kamen. And Mooney, as we've noted, was around back then, so could well have been pulling from old knowledge when he took on the gig.
The Perky/Booby strips wouldn't have shown up on their own merit. It was the Bear connection and Jim Mooney. When you look at some contemporaneous Funny Animals like Cosmo Cat, who regularly killed his opponents or drove them to suicide, these really are quite tame. It the time frame that spawned Tom & Jerry as mainstream nice.
I've noted before that these were quite different from most religious comics - they knew that the books had to be entertaining first, or they'd already lost their audience. That was why the title lasted just over a quarter century. (The quality of the talent didn't hurt, of course) And since they ran History comics and Bible tales with violence as an inherent part of them, i suspect that made it easier to keep to a low level of the cartoon violence that was the standard of the time.
This comes from before they started publishing a Teacher's Guide with the comics, so we can't refer to them for more concrete information. But that fits with notes on later strips.
It's the Perky-Booby joke that surprised me.