Following on from the post about Quality's line of funny animal heroes the other day, let's move ahead a few years, and look at one particular story from Marmaduke Mouse #26, dated October 1951.
Writer and artist unknown - they didn't credit people in those days, and it doesn't look like Ernie Hart's work. Nobody on the internet seems to have ever bothered to research the creators of lesser-known funny-animal comics, which I think is a great shame. Maybe we can pin down individual artists from variations in the costumes - this one, like quite a few Marmaduke stories around that time, doesn't draw the strap on Louie's overalls, but does pay quite detailed attention to Marmaduke's safety pin.
Anyway, this is a pretty typical kind of slight and unoriginal storyline, it just gets a little interesting towards the end...
Marmaduke gets an official title here - he's more normally just a general sidekick and dogsbody to Louie. This is pretty typical of the life they lead, though - for a king, Louie always seems to be down on his luck!
And this confirms what the story is this month - we're doing Jack and the Beanstalk. Obviously, this is seventy years ago, so a lot of the familiar tellings were still to come, but it's fair to say the story would be expected to be well known and seen many times before by all the readers. There had already been two Mickey Mouse cartoons on the theme by this point! It's the done thing for a story like this to give a new and funny twist to it - updating it by selling the car rather than the family cow!
Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Marmaduke is an adult. That he wears nothing but a nappy is just part of his character design; it's rarely mentioned and never explained. His big brother, Manly Mouse, appears in one story, and he wears them too, so maybe there's some kind of hereditary condition. Although since Manly is hugely muscular and works as a fat lady in a circus, justifying it with "I get so cold in winter and the stuffing and inflating I wear as the fat lady keeps me warm!" he seems to run the gamut of every popular fetish culture you can find on the internet in the twenty-first century. Anyway, back to the comparatively normal adventures of Marmaduke and Louie...
It's not uncommon for Marmaduke to be confined to the dungeons. Working for Louie doesn't generally seem to be a very rewarding career...
It's interesting that Louie calls for the guards repeatedly, and they do what he wants off-panel without making an appearance. The early Ernie Hart stories used quite a bit of creativity with background characters, but these later anonymous entries into the series weren't quite so inspired. And so Marmaduke climbs the beanstalk... my favourite twist on the old story comes from an Order of the Stick book, in which Elan tells the tale and ends it at the point where the giant beanstalk first grows - Jack and his mother cheer that now they have all the beans they can eat, and can sell the surplus for a profit! They'll never be poor or hungry again! The end!
The giant doesn't seem particularly unreasonable or unpleasant. But still, Marmaduke feels it would be a good idea to rescue the duck that lays the golden eggs. For it to be a duck, rather than a goose or hen, is unusual, but there might just be a reason behind it...
I mean, like I mentioned last time, the life of a cartoon animal tends to come with the understanding that there are people out there who will eat you if they get the chance, and everyone tends to be rather blasé about the whole idea. Plenty of more modern cartoons have subverted the trope - one of my favourites is a fun moment in Rocko's Modern Life (1993) in which his chicken neighbour goes for a job interview with a poultry packaging company, and gets turned into the product. But it's really pretty striking and unique for the central characters of the story to cheerfully tuck into the roasted corpse of Marmaduke's 'pal' like this, isn't it? Makes you think he's not as wholesome as he appears...
One final thing worth noticing - this duck is definitely referred to as a 'he', and proves his gender by wearing a man's hat, but he does apparently lay eggs. The world of Marmaduke Mouse is a strange one.
No comments:
Post a Comment