Category Archives: John Stanley

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : Four Color Comics at Cool-Mo-Dee : February 25th, 2009

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STWALLSKULL'S HEY! KIDS! COMICS!

Much like the Crosseyed Cyclops I mentioned yesterday, Cool-Mo-Dee has also posted a whole comics collection worth of great old comics. Recently they’ve been doing the world the great service of focusing on one of my favorite series of all time… which is also I believe the longest running (numerically) comic title of all time… Dell’s Four Color series.

Dell licensed and published most of the popular highly recognizable children’s icons of the era that they were in business, and they had most of the best children’s cartoonists working for them (Barks, Kelly, Stanley, and many others) from the 30’s through the 60’s.

I’m not sure how frequently Four Color came out (weekly? bi-monthly?) but the last issue was numbered #1354. It was not a conventional series featuring one character, but a long series of one shots featuring Dell’s huge library of popular licensed characters.

Four Color‘s run includes the first Donald Duck comic and the first Uncle Scrooge comic among other wonderful things… many of the greatest adventure tales of Carl Barks were Four Color one shots. Walt Kelly did a huge body of brilliant non-Pogo work for children in the Four Color books in a number of different titles.

Titles that proved particularly popular were often spun off into their own series, so Four Color was very much a testing ground for Dell as well. The vast majority of the Four Color comics have never been reprinted and probably never will be.

Pictured above is a typically charming cover to a typically charming issue of Raggedy Ann (Four Color #72), which you can download here.

You can read more about the Four Color series on Wikipedia here.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : More Mattias, Stanley’s Tubby, C.C. Beck’s Fatman : October 10th, 2008

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STWALLSKULL'S HEY! KIDS! COMICS!

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEMS:

Cartoonist Mattias, who I have mentioned a couple times recently, just opened an Etsy shop selling his originals. A lot of gorgeous stuff to look at there… and it is cheap! Only forty bucks for the “dog” below… from the high quality of his stuff, I would guess few of us will be able to afford any of his originals in five years.

Stanley Stories gives us a typically hilarious John Stanley Tubby story, illustrated by Lloyd White. Click the image to go there.

And Again With the Comics brings us another fatty, (co-creator of Captain Marvel) C.C. Beck’s Fatman the Human Flying Saucer.

HEY! KIDS! COMICS! : John Stanley’s Other Comics : June 26th, 2008

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STWALLSKULL'S HEY! KIDS! COMICS!

Scans Daily has recently had a number of posts of comics written by the great John Stanley. I’ve been reading a whole lot of Stanley’s brilliant Little Lulu comics recently with my daughter, and they are some of the best kids’ comics ever written. So great is Little Lulu that is has overshadowed Stanley’s other comics work in most comics aficionados minds.

It is interesting to see some more of his other work… his work was rarely credited at the companies he worked for, and I hadn’t really realized what a variety of work he did.

If you want more, note the wonderful (and very affordable) series of Little Lulu books that was recently published by Dark Horse Comics, and also note that Drawn and Quarterly recently announced that they will be publishing much of Stanley’s other comics work. Click the image below to go to the latest Stanley post on Scans Daily.