Dirty... duck?

[dr_hermes.insanejournal.com]

Here's a sample from 1971 of Bobby London's DIRTY DUCK. This strip started out in the undergrounds, moved on to THE NATIONAL LAMPOON and then PLAYBOY. There's an overwhelming George Harriman influence in the art, but instead of the surreal and baffling interplay between Krazy Kat, Ignatz and Offisa Pup, DIRTY DUCK reveled in raunch. Sex, drugs, questionable language and attitudes not suitable for good citizenship.. that was the ticket. London went on to take over the POPEYE strip. He was also married to talented Shary Flenniken (who gave us TROTS AND BONNIE).

Comments

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

Dirty Duck started out in underground comix? Makes sense. I've seen plenty of those comics in Playboy over the years. Did Dirty Duck's assistant, Weevil, appear in the pre-Playboy strips?

Me, I always preferred Little Annie Fanny, at its best.

[dr_hermes.insanejournal.com]

Yep, Weevil was around in the early days, the little perv.

Both Bobby London and Shary Flenniken started with an underground comic called MICKEY MOUSE MEET THE AIR PIRATES. I haven't seen it (although I think it is floating around the Internet somewhere). Reportedly, it was a well drawn strip with classic Disney characters doing drugs and sexing it up. Disney lawyers showed disapproval.

LITTLE ANNIE FANNY started out as excellent satire. Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, working with fewer restrictions than they had in MAD days. I haven't seen a collection of the strip, but it might be worth picking up to see the different topical gags from the 1950s and 1960s. (I do remember Manduck the Magician hypnotizing Annie, getting her to strip and then only making her cluck like a chicken... he had been in show biz too long.)

Hefner seemed to be genuinely fond of the pulps and Golden Age comics, references turned up in PLAYBOY constantly.

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

I'd definitely recommend the first volume of Dark Horse's Little Annie Fanny, covering the sixties. There's a second volume covering the remainder of the strip's run (seventies and eighties--it was published more sporadically both decades), but I didn't enjoy it as much. From around the early seventies onward, the strip turned away from the witty and sharp cultural satire Kurtzman was known for--with Annie's nudity being more the icing on the cake--and became all orgy, all the time. My guess is that either Kurtzman got burned out or Hefner, who was engaged in an ongoing war with the more X-rated Penthouse, pressured Kurtzman and Elder to porn it up. Also, in the first (1960s) volume you get to see the work of several great comics artists (Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, and Russ Heath) who assisted Elder with the art, which was much more elaborate the first several years.

[ashtoreth.insanejournal.com]

I wonder who came first, Groucho or that duck..cuz one of them was ripping somebody off!

[parsimonia.insanejournal.com]

I...he...mustache...top-hat...There you go using an icon that breaks my brain. Again.

[dr_hermes.insanejournal.com]

Well, the comic started in 1971 and Groucho's first movie was in 1929. But there is such a thing as a homage, rather than a rip-off.

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

I appreciate the homage style, but find myself unmoved by this example of it. The frames where the dog is standing still and the backgrounds change completely for no appreciable reason are just distracting.

[dr_hermes.insanejournal.com]

London doesn't have Herriman's dreamlike sense of logic. In KRAZY KAT, the backgrounds changed for no apparent reason but it seemed to fit. London also doesn't have that cryptic language Herriman used; I sometimes think some of the appeal of KRAZY KAT is the satisfaction of deciphering what the characters are saying.

I do like the butler's expression changing as he reads the card. That's a nice touch.

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

Krazy's dialogue in particular is fun to read, being a hodgepodge of several different American urban accents and dialects: Irish, Yiddish, Spanish and, well I'd have to be a linguist to identify them all.