Appreciate the squirrels

 January 21st is Squirrel Appreciation Day, an important event in the calendar founded by some weird American on the internet a few years ago. I think squirrels are great, as I've mentioned many times on this blog.

So I'm rather disappointed to find something called the UK Squirrel Accord, a big bunch of sciurine racists, have claimed the day as "RED Squirrel Appreciation Day", and have a whole website full of articles about how to get rid of horrid invasive species like grey squirrels. Sciurine racists, I tell you. Grey squirrels are great, and I'm going to form them into an army to take down this horrid bunch of horrid people.

T'other Toth

 I see on the BBC news that AFC Bournemouth have signed Alex Toth, who turns out to be a promising young Hungarian midfielder who might fill the gap in the Cherries' ranks left by star player Antoine Semenyo upping and leaving for the higher wages of Manchester City. I just hope it leads to a lot of people searching for details of Alex Toth on the internet and learning all about the great American comic book artist of the same name.

Actually, Alex Toth the artist died in 2006, and Alex Toth the footballer is apparently twenty years old... no, disappointingly, their lives did overlap a little, so it's probably not a case of reincarnation, but it comes pretty close. It's still a good excuse to write a blog about some little-known comics, so let's explore the world of Sierra Smith, Western Detective!

Sierra made his debut in the first issue of Dale Evans Comics, published in June 1948:

If you're wondering who Dale Evans is, you're probably not reading this in the year 1948 - Roy Rogers was a really big name, a mega-celebrity and very much the kind of superstar whose merchandise kids would eagerly spend their post-war pocket money on. A licensed Roy Rogers comic had been published by Dell since 1947, and was selling like hot cakes. DC Comics felt they'd missed the boat quite badly there, in their quest to find something new to replace the increasingly unpopular superheroes that had made them into the leading comics publisher of the early 1940s. So because they couldn't get Roy Rogers (and Trigger the horse presumably demanded too high a fee), they signed the next-best thing - Roy's celebrity wife, Dale Evans, Queen of the Westerns!

This comic was a bi-monthly, and every issue contained three comic adventures of Dale (in which her life as a celebrity movie star was continually interrupted by real-life cowboy adventures involving bank robberies and the like for her to thwart), friendly updates on her life (which, unlike the comic stories, were allowed to mention her husband and family), other filler stuff of the type that filled all anthology comics back then, and one backup strip - our hero, Sierra Smith.

Sierra is a noir detective, who lives in the modern-day wild west. It's written by Joe Millard, and drawn by Alex Toth (the artist, who will at that time have been about the same age that the Bournemouth-bound Hungarian footballer is now). It's a strange mix, but he's very much the character archetype. He's a hard-boiled detective, good with his fists, perpetually cynical, perpetually short of money, perpetually aggravating his secretary and girlfriend Nan, and always getting the job done in the end.

His investigations involve a lot of abandoned gold mines, interspersed with an occasional bank robbery. They follow the standard comic formula of the time - Sierra always uncovers the villain's evil scheme, investigates, gets knocked out and captured, escapes, thwarts the evil-doers and sometimes even gets paid (though he tends to squander the money on solving the crime and Nan complains about how he expects them to eat tonight). They're actually great fun, if you're in the mood!

The first story involves a bit of good old-fashioned cross-dressing, too...

And a year later, in Dale Evans Comics #7, Dale herself encounters the same kind of thing. One can only speculate whether she personally approved of this kind of fun, and whether she and Roy (and Trigger) indulged in the same kind of merriment behind closed doors:

The beauty contest for cowboys, if you were wondering, was organised by a man who wanted to rob the bank, and knew if the cowboys were all wearing long skirts and no guns, they wouldn't be able to stop him. But Dale sorts him out in the end, don't worry.

Millard and Toth only remained on Sierra Smith for the first eleven adventures, but I heartily recommend checking them out! It's one of those lost classics of late-forties American comic history, and I just hope Bournemouth's new midfielder can produce the same kind of entertainment!

Father's day

It's not Father's Day; that happens in June. But I saw someone on Facebook today saying it's Peppermint Patty's birthday and sharing the Peanuts comic first published in an October that says it's her birthday, which got me thinking paternally anyway. Because I've noted before that it does quite often seem that fictional characters I really love have a strong loving relationship with a single father. I don't think that's a requirement for becoming a favourite of mine, but it certainly doesn't hurt. So on this no-particular-occasion, as we're only a couple of months away from the twentieth anniversary of my own father's death, let's take a look at a few great single dads of cartoon history.

Single fathers were surprisingly commonplace in the American cartoons of the 1980s that I grew up with. It was very common to see a kid who just had a dad, and nobody even gave the slightest clue as to whether there had ever been a mother involved in the child's creation at some point. But the likes of Spike Witwicky (Transformers) and Scott Trakker (MASK) never thrilled me all that much, and Defenders of the Earth (four single men, each with a child, and that's not counting Ming the Merciless being a single father too) has never been a particular favourite, although it's got some really great moments. We have to move into more modern times before we get a real favourite of mine who falls into that category, so let's start with the latest and greatest...

I have still got an enormous crush on Simon Seville. The whole series ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks is so wonderfully written, directed and produced and that one character is so completely and totally me in every way, I'm just infatuated (I'm a rather self-absorbed person, if you look at it that way). Let me share with you one amazing moment that I point out to everyone...

If you're not familiar with Alvin and the Chipmunks (even though I've gone on about it at such length in the past), David Seville is the adoptive father of the three chipmunk boys. They often combine to drive him mad, but underneath that is such a mutual love, it pervades everything they do. Simon is the quiet one, but all three really need  and thrive on Dave's care and attention in their own way. In the episode "Writer's Block", they think they've made Dave run away from home, and at the end he has to reassure them. And while he talks to Theodore and Alvin, calming their fears, and Simon just sits silently to the side, keeping his worries to himself, Dave reaches out and pats Simon's head, just giving him that silent reassurance. It's a moment that melts my heart, and I so admire the way it's worked into that scene. Perhaps nobody else even notices it, but it's my all-time most-loved moment in the show.

Now let's move on to The Owl House, and my most-loved character there, Gus. He also just has a dad, and in this case there's never any mention of a mother being involved, in the classic style. And since he's a witch from the Boiling Isles, which have different laws of nature altogether, perhaps he really never had a mother in the first place. But at the end of the final episode, "Watching and Dreaming", they're finally reunited after the horrors of the Collector's reign and the final conflict with Belos...

If you're not familiar with The Owl House, you might not even notice that Gus seems to me to be unusually small in this scene, and I wonder whether it's deliberate, or just a result of inconsistent art and regular confusion over his character design. Gus is (almost uniquely in cartoons) a young teenage boy whose voice actor was a young teenage boy, and Issac Ryan Brown's voice was breaking during production of the first season. As an in-joke, Gus has a big overnight growth spurt as well as a deeper voice when season two begins, which he cheerfully ascribes to 'witch puberty', and his relative size compared to other characters does seem to fluctuate rather from that point on. But it's possible his smallness here is deliberate - he's a very powerful witch specialising in illusion magic, so I can see him unconsciously making himself look little when reunited with Perry. In any case, I love this scene and the attachment the two of them have to each other.

And let's go back to the nineties and hear it for Chuckie in Rugrats, and the love between him and his father Chas. Because that's one of the most wonderful pieces of characterisation in animation history, and always worthy of a mention.

If you're not familiar with Rugrats, the premise is that the babies wander off and have adventures by themselves, unnoticed by their parents who generally look on their offspring as objects to be kept around the place and largely ignored. The exception is Chas, who always has a warm and caring relationship with his son Chuckie, though it's mainly offscreen - Chuckie is perpetually around at Tommy's house while his single father Chas is working. And the episode "Mother's Day" goes into detail about how the situation arose - Chuckie's mother died when he was very young. That clearly wasn't the original intention of the series (a character model for Chuckie's mother exists, and was used in the background of one episode but not identified), but really made the characters make a lot more sense once this episode came along. It's absolutely beautiful, in fact, and you all need to go and watch it.

But let's move back even further in time and look at Peanuts, which started this whole train of thought. If you're not familiar with Peanuts, what's wrong with you? It's perhaps the most famous American newspaper comic of all time, and it's spawned no end of cartoons and films! But if you're still unfamiliar, the thing about parents (and all adults) in Peanuts is that they're never seen and rarely even mentioned. My favourite character there has to be Schroeder, and he follows the trend in never showing any sign of having a father or mother. We assume his parents took him on his vacation to Europe in 1958 (this strip from 16 November), but that's the closest he ever comes. Quite impressive for someone who was a small baby when he first appeared!

But the two characters who come a close second in my personal estimation are also the two who actually do have that father-son bond I appreciate so much. Charlie Brown's father isn't single (the rarely-mentioned Mrs Brown is a housewife, and that's about all we know about her), but he really does love his son, best shown in this strip from June 21, 1964. Violet is fond of boasting about her dad, but Charlie Brown is the one who definitely comes out on top for once.

And the very best father-child relationship in Peanuts comes from my other most-loved character, and the one who started this whole train of thought, Peppermint Patty. She doesn't have a mother (for reasons never explained) and lives with her single father, to whom she's very attached. Their relationship, although of course we never see him, is quite beautiful, and perhaps never more so than in this one, October 4th, 1970.

Yes, let's all celebrate all the fictional fathers out there - they're doing a great job!