Dognose evolution?

[mayzshon]

I was reading the first Phantom Blot story, and when he was unmasked as a dognose (that just so happened to resemble Walt) it got me wondering, when did the dognose characters start appearing?
Not the ones like Colonel Doberman or Goofy, who actually have dog like features, but the other ones? The mostly human, but with the big usually black nose? Sometimes dog ears, sometimes human.
Are they Disney exclusive, or has anything like them appeared anywhere else?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

They're not Disney-exclusive, you'll find them in other funny-animals books of the same era, I've observed. Though I think Disney started it. I believe the usual word is that Barks started the trend of the *really* human ones — the ones who have a human skull shape with little to no snout — though I don't know if that's true (certainly the Phantom Blot predates him; but Gottfredson's early dognoses are slightly different, with vertical black noses instead of the more rounded ones Barks normalized).

[That Duckfan]

Jun 3, 2023 19:10:38 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

They're not Disney-exclusive, you'll find them in other funny-animals books of the same era, I've observed. Though I think Disney started it. I believe the usual word is that Barks started the trend of the *really* human ones — the ones who have a human skull shape with little to no snout — though I don't know if that's true (certainly the Phantom Blot predates him; but Gottfredson's early doghouses are slightly different, with vertical black noses instead of the more rounded ones Barks normalized).

Taliaferro is the missing link here, he created dogfaces for the Donald newspaper strip that were anatomically similar to Barks', but kept the Gottfredson Mickey-like faces. The earliest Barks stories also have these dogfaces. Barks begins to experiment with faces that don't have the black contours around face in the stories for OS #29, The Mummy's Ring, and The Hard Loser, but the first *true* dogface would appear in WDC #38 -- Neighbor Jones.

[quiof]

TV Tropes and Wikipedia cite several examples, such as a dog in Merrie Melodies and even Beagle Boys-like in Woody Woodpecker by John Stanley, something I mentioned in the tread about non-Beagle Boys bandits.
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Dogfaces

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfaces_(comics)


featherysociety.proboards.com/thread/1200/criminal-beagle-men-who-boys

[stuftmcduck]

I wonder why dogs were chosen as the apparent majority type of "animal-people" in Disney's comics. Just because they're such a familiar animal in everyday life?

[quiof]

In DuckTales there are dognoses, but in Quack Pack there were humans.

[Ramapith]

Here are some dogface characters from Porky Pig Four Color [series II] 16 (1942), drawn by eventual Disney comics artist/editor Carl Buettner. More doglike than Barks' early 1950s characters, but already evolving away from the 1930s bloodhound look—arguably at a similar speed to Disney dogfaces.



Here's a link to Tex Avery's THUGS WITH DIRTY MUGS (1939), a Merrie Melodies cartoon where the entire cast of comedy cops and robbers are dogfaces for no obvious reason—other than that funny animals were generally popular; one looks a little like Detective Casey, and some look more like humans than others.

Choosing dogs as the "generic" animal species was clearly a trend at the time, and Warner seems to be as responsible as Disney. Here are BUDDY THE GEE MAN and Avery's THE BLOW-OUT (both 1935) a few years earlier; at this point, Schlesinger was moving into the Porky series from the earlier "Buddy" series, whose star was a human; both cartoons include a mixture of humans and animals, but while the animals include cats, cows, frogs, pigs, and hippos, dogs are overwhelmingly the most common.

[djnyr]

I think the dognose default setting also has something to do with the fact that it was comparatively easy for artists to draw a human character, then turn him into a "dog" by adding a token nose or pair of floppy ears, as opposed to figuring out how to effectively humanize horses or lions or alligators or other more distinctive animals. Most cartoonists, Barks included, had more experience drawing humans than they did drawing anthropomorphic animals, and it must have been a welcome shortcut for them to only have to worry about transposing human expressions onto the "star" animal characters instead of spending time on anthropomorphizing each incidental character's appearance and expressions. I admit that, as a kid, I was always a little disappointed with the fact that most of the characters in Duckburg, other than the Ducks themselves, were just thinly disguised humans, and always perked up when an actual animal character appeared--like the bull and bear billionaires that Barks drew into "The Christmas Cha Cha" or the owl judge in many Barks stories.

[Matilda]

Jun 4, 2023 23:09:24 GMT djnyr said:

I think the dognose default setting also has something to do with the fact that it was comparatively easy for artists to draw a human character, then turn him into a "dog" by adding a token nose or pair of floppy ears, as opposed to figuring out how to effectively humanize horses or lions or alligators or other more distinctive animals. Most cartoonists, Barks included, had more experience drawing humans than they did drawing anthropomorphic animals, and it must have been a welcome shortcut for them to only have to worry about transposing human expressions onto the "star" animal characters instead of spending time on anthropomorphizing each incidental character's appearance and expressions. I admit that, as a kid, I was always a little disappointed with the fact that most of the characters in Duckburg, other than the Ducks themselves, were just thinly disguised humans, and always perked up when an actual animal character appeared--like the bull and bear billionaires that Barks drew into "The Christmas Cha Cha" or the owl judge in many Barks stories.

Because I read some Daisy Duck’s Diary comics in childhood, my Duckburg did have Clara Cluck and Rockhead Rooster in addition to the Ducks and Gyro and Magica and Glomgold…plus the ones you mention. But I agree, the characters who weren’t just dognose humans stood out. Mr. Birdmind, Lah Deedah, Miss Minemore, the Phantom of Notre Duck: most of my favorite one-shot characters have beaks. In fact, the only Barksian one-shot dognose characters I can think of that I’m deeply fond of are Miss Penny Wise and the guy who blows the alpenhorn in “Donald’s Raucous Role”—and he has such a distinctive design, he doesn’t quite seem like a regular (dognose) human.

[RobbK1]

Jun 4, 2023 23:09:24 GMT djnyr said:

I think the dognose default setting also has something to do with the fact that it was comparatively easy for artists to draw a human character, then turn him into a "dog" by adding a token nose or pair of floppy ears, as opposed to figuring out how to effectively humanize horses or lions or alligators or other more distinctive animals. Most cartoonists, Barks included, had more experience drawing humans than they did drawing anthropomorphic animals, and it must have been a welcome shortcut for them to only have to worry about transposing human expressions onto the "star" animal characters instead of spending time on anthropomorphizing each incidental character's appearance and expressions. I admit that, as a kid, I was always a little disappointed with the fact that most of the characters in Duckburg, other than the Ducks themselves, were just thinly disguised humans, and always perked up when an actual animal character appeared--like the bull and bear billionaires that Barks drew into "The Christmas Cha Cha" or the owl judge in many Barks stories.

That was my own experience as well.  I think it was a Western Publishing staple, with other publishers' either having either a rather large variety of different "species" of sentient, human-behaving animals, or the exact opposite tact of having only the stars and their best friends and relatives as animals, and otherwise populating their stories with all Humans.  Walter Lantz's crew used the latter with Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and later Oswald Rabbit stories, similar to the later WB Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, whereas, Daffy Duck and Sniffles (Mouse) & Mary Jane were often mixed, and Beep, Beep The Roadrunner used mostly all animals.  I liked The Sangor Studio (moonlighting animation artists) funny animal comic book work for (Sangor's) American Comics Group (Giggle, Ha Ha, Funny Films, Hi-Jinx, Merry-Go-Round, Laffy-Daffy, and America's Funniest Comics, and the related funny animal Titles owned by Ned Pines' Nedor and Standard Comics (Coo-Coo, Barnyard, Goofy, Happy, Dizzy Duck, Buster Bunny, Real/Funny Funnies, and SuperMouse, whose funny animal stories used a very wide variety of different anthropomorphic animal species.  Both publishers' funny animal series often used the unusual choices of animals as the stars of the series or feature (i.e. aardvark, alligator, crocodile, turtle, badger, parrot, eagle, lynx, horse, bull, etc.)

[Ramapith]

I'd be remiss not to mention that in the runup to World War II, "dogface" was primarily slang for an Army soldier—due to the "dog tags" (metal ID tags) they wore—and the Looney Tunes animators were certainly aware of it: here is INFANTRY BLUES, a Private Snafu cartoon made for the war effort, in which Snafu repeatedly uses the term to describe himself and other troopers.

Ironically, the soldiers in these shorts were humans; but it's quite clear that unlucky humans perceived themselves as living the proverbial dog's life.

[RobbK1]

Jun 4, 2023 10:59:13 GMT quiof said:

TV Tropes and Wikipedia cite several examples, such as a dog in Merrie Melodies and even Beagle Boys-like in Woody Woodpecker by John Stanley, something I mentioned in the tread about non-Beagle Boys bandits.
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Dogfaces

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfaces_(comics)


featherysociety.proboards.com/thread/1200/criminal-beagle-men-who-boys

Ha! Ha. As a 5 to 7 year old Soda Pop bottlecap collector, this was, always, by far, my favourite Woody Woodpecker gag! 

[Dr Ivo G Bombastus]

There was a general trend in early theatrical animation to make talking dog characters more human looking over time. Notably, Fleischer's star character Betty Boop was originally a talking dog when she first appeared as the love interest of Bimbo (who was a more stylized talking dog).


Even after Betty became human, her cartoons were inhabited almost exclusively by funny animal characters, especially dogfaces.