Br'er Rabbit Sunday stories

[Al Levin]

I recently got this old Italian volume, which collects every Uncle Remus Sunday strip from the very beginning (1945) up 'till 1952 (the last 5 1952 Sundays are missing unfortunately). AFAIK this is the only collection of the Remus strips ever published.

The stories written by George Stallings are very funny, and beautifully drawn by Dick Moores. Truth be told, they are very simple stories, but Stallings is very creative and it is nice to see how forest community reacts to various events, Br'er Rabbit's relationship with Molly (a great character who doesn't fall for Br'er Rabbit's lies), and the occasional trips to the outside world beyond the forest. Moores is also very consistent with background characters. There are some unnamed characters who are always there.

The various stories are also connected to each others, in a Gottfredson's fashion. In fact, each story from ZB 4704 (7th story by Stalling, first strip: April 27, 1947) to ZB 4803 (last strip: June 27, 1948) flows into each other. For more than a year!

Then they just... stopped. On February 20, 1949 the strip became gag-a-week, and it was not the same anymore. Molly's appearances also became rarer (she's a character better suited to long stories IMHO). Does anyone know why? There is a great feeling of missed potential there, because the formula they used for the first 3 years was very good.

[Ramapith]

As time went on, King Features seems to have felt, overwhelmingly, that gag strips were better than continuity strips, especially on Sundays. Mickey rarely had any Sunday continuities after the war; Donald had none; and then there was this otherwise inexplicable decision that weakened Brer Rabbit tremendously.

Of course, this was all preamble to King's later mid-1950s decision to turn the Mickey and Scamp *dailies* from continuity strips to gag strips; the shift hit Scamp less than a year after its launch and was at least as damaging to him as to Brer Rabbit. (While the strip is still funny, it becomes IMHO much weaker than Scamp's comic *book* stories.)

I have to imagine that sales of the strips must have actually gone better when they were gag strips, or King would have reversed its decisions, but you never can tell. Brer Rabbit and Scamp certainly survived for decades as gag strips, even if they look weaker to us in retrospect.

The Mickey daily strip became a continuity again in the 1990s, but mainly due to pressure from Floyd Norman and others at Disney, who urgently wanted it to be. Editor-in-chief Jay Kennedy at King resisted, and asked for a compromise where as many strips as possible still had to end with one-liner-type jokes—and specifically, jokes simple enough for young kids to understand. (I remember because I was a writer for the strip at the very end; only one story, and so late in the game that it was never drawn or published. It was to have come after the Norman story that Rick Hoover was drawing when production stopped.)

How many young kids would have been reading the newspaper for a daily strip? Kennedy was a nice guy, but none of us really understood why he did what he did on this.

[niko]

It is a pity that the brer rabbit sundays will never be republished. Unfortunately I don‘t understand italian.

[Al Levin]

Nov 8, 2023 16:15:54 GMT Ramapith said:

As time went on, King Features seems to have felt, overwhelmingly, that gag strips were better than continuity strips, especially on Sundays. Mickey rarely had any Sunday continuities after the war; Donald had none; and then there was this otherwise inexplicable decision that weakened Brer Rabbit tremendously.

Of course, this was all preamble to King's later mid-1950s decision to turn the Mickey and Scamp *dailies* from continuity strips to gag strips; the shift hit Scamp less than a year after its launch and was at least as damaging to him as to Brer Rabbit. (While the strip is still funny, it becomes IMHO much weaker than Scamp's comic *book* stories.)

I have to imagine that sales of the strips must have actually gone better when they were gag strips, or King would have reversed its decisions, but you never can tell. Brer Rabbit and Scamp certainly survived for decades as gag strips, even if they look weaker to us in retrospect.

The Mickey daily strip became a continuity again in the 1990s, but mainly due to pressure from Floyd Norman and others at Disney, who urgently wanted it to be. Editor-in-chief Jay Kennedy at King resisted, and asked for a compromise where as many strips as possible still had to end with one-liner-type jokes—and specifically, jokes simple enough for young kids to understand. (I remember because I was a writer for the strip at the very end; only one story, and so late in the game that it was never drawn or published. It was to have come after the Norman story that Rick Hoover was drawing when production stopped.)

How many young kids would have been reading the newspaper for a daily strip? Kennedy was a nice guy, but none of us really understood why he did what he did on this.

Thanks for the answer! Looking at Inducks, Scamp was also drawn by the good Moores, and he left the strips when it became gag-a-day. Maybe he didn't like the new direction?

What seems strange to me is that, in theory, seeing how the story continues should prompt people to buy the latest newspaper issue. Surely King has thought about it?

By the way, David, I've seen that in the Norwegian Gottfredson library you talked about these proto-strips. Two panels were also published in the Fanta Library, but everything on the right side of the page has never been published anywhere else, AFAIK. Were those strips written by Stallings before the Song of South project started? Also... Did Gottfredson drawn the gang in the bottom left picture there? That drawing is not indexed unfortunately

[Ramapith]

Nov 11, 2023 15:53:37 GMT Al Levin said:

By the way, David, I've seen that in the Norwegian Gottfredson library you talked about these proto-strips. Two panels were also published in the Fanta Library, but everything on the right side of the page has never been published anywhere else, AFAIK. Were those strips written by Stallings before the Song of South project started? Also... Did Gottfredson drawn the gang in the bottom left picture there? That drawing is not indexed unfortunately

The right-side strip was written by Stallings and drawn by Mel Shaw. A partial memory of its creation was given by Shaw here. Shaw recollected himself and writer Stallings arranging to launch an Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit strip with King Features, sublicensed from Disney, during the studio strike—in 1941—and that after the strike ended, there was an instant falling-out with Roy Disney about plans to make the strip.

While I don't doubt there was a falling-out between Shaw and Roy, evidence doesn't 100% match his memories; there were clearly some slightly later attempts to get his version of the strip produced internally at Disney. That right-hand strip, complete with a Shaw signature, comes from a Disney Comic Strip Department photo negative dated November 1941, four months after the strike ended.

As if to show its place in the developmental process, I found it shelved at Disney alongside a 1942 non-Shaw example: the one published in the FGL, and from which two panels also appeared in the Norwegian book. I'm not sure who wrote it; Gottfredson would have supervised it, and it has the 1940s-Gottfredson-like element of round, thick eyebrows on Brer Bear, not seen elsewhere (though I don't think the final art is Gottfredson's).

I've seen isolated panels, or groups of panels, from even more early 1940s Brer Rabbit strip attempts, showing that the Gottfredson-run Comic Strip Department spent awhile trying to launch the strip years before the film. I'd have to guess these premature efforts evolved from the fact that King was so interested in Shaw's version.