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Michael Barrier 
Funnybooks 
The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books

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Cover of Michael Barrier: Funnybooks (ePUB)
Funnybooks is the story of the most popular American comic books of the 1940s and 1950s, those published under the Dell label. For a time, ‘Dell Comics Are Good Comics’ was more than a slogan—it was a simple statement of fact. Many of the stories written and drawn by people like Carl Barks
(Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge), John Stanley
(Little Lulu), and Walt Kelly
(Pogo) repay reading and rereading by educated adults even today, decades after they were published as disposable entertainment for children. Such triumphs were improbable, to say the least, because midcentury comics were so widely dismissed as trash by angry parents, indignant librarians, and even many of the people who published them. It was all but miraculous that a few great cartoonists were able to look past that nearly universal scorn and grasp the artistic potential of their medium. With clarity and enthusiasm, Barrier explains what made the best stories in the Dell comic books so special. He deftly turns a complex and detailed history into an expressive narrative sure to appeal to an audience beyond scholars and historians.
€37.99
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Table of Content

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: ‘The Very Good Ones’


1. Mickey in a Magazine

2. Oskar Lebeck Meets Walt Kelly

3. Whitman, K.K., and Dell

4. Learning on the Job in L.A.

5. A Feel for Walt Kelly’s Stuff

6. Animal Magnetism

7. Cartoon Conundrums

8. Carl Barks Makes His Break

9. Barks Becomes the Duck Man

10. The Workman: Gaylord Du Bois

11. The Observer: John Stanley

12. ‘I Am a Backwoods Bumpkin’

13. ‘Pure Corn’ at Disney’s

14. Special Talents

15. Barks Masters His Medium

16. An Arena for All the Passions

17. Animal Kingdoms

18. Walt Kelly Branches Out

19. Strong-Handed Friends

20. Carl Barks: The Virtuoso

21. Walt Kelly Escapes

22. Oskar Lebeck in Exile

23. Manifest Destiny

24. Uncle Scrooge: Play Money

25. Carl Barks in Purgatory

26. The Slow Fade

27. Disasters


Epilogue: Can These Bones Live?

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

About the author

Michael Barrier is the author of Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age and The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. He is also coeditor (with Martin Williams) of A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics and coauthor (with Harvey Kurtzman) of From Aargh! to Zap! Harvey Kurtzman’s Visual History of the Comics.
Language English ● Format EPUB ● Pages 432 ● ISBN 9780520960022 ● File size 22.5 MB ● Publisher University of California Press ● Published 2014 ● Edition 1 ● Downloadable 24 months ● Currency EUR ● ID 5512025 ● Copy protection Adobe DRM
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