Sunday 3 August 2008

MISC. LI'L BAD WOLF COMICS FROM 1946-47

After Carl Buettner, the first artist on Li'l Bad Wolf comics at Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, left the series in 1946, several different artist tried their hand on it for about a year before Gil Turner became the main artist of the series. George Waiss was one of these artists who temporarily worked on Li'l Bad Wolf in the post-Buettner/pre-Turner bracket era. Below are scans from his first try, published in no. 70 of WDC&S:

This is actually a very nice story (writer unknown). Li'l Bad Wolf reminds his pop his promise to get him a cat on his birthday, but the Big Bad Wolf refuses to honor his promise. Coincidentally, a witch turns him to a cat on the same day!, with the below consequences:

In the end, it fortunately turnes out to be..

The artwork of Waiss (who was the inker of Donald Duck newspaper comics at the time) is decent enough 'though not perfect. His rendering of Big Bad Wolf's face is OK, but the shape of the wolf's body is somewhat skewed with much narrow shoulders and a much wide waist.
Nothing can compare to ugliness in former animator Paul Murry's work on the series (who would later be a prolific artist on Mickey Mouse), as can be seen in the below scan from WDC&S no.84, his thankfully last before Turner took over:

Incidentally, the plot of this story (writer unknown), even though mediocre, carries an interesting self-referential joke in terms of Disney productions: Note how Big Bad Wolf reacts to his son promoting the book Jack and the Beanstalk, which happened to be the basis of a segment of the movie Fun and Fancy Tree that was released in the same month (Sept. 1947) this comics was published and promoted on its back cover:

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I just discovered this wonderful blog the other day. It is very interesting to read so much about one of my favorite characters!

I would love to see more about the book/comic versions of the cartoon "The Practical Pig", as it is my favorite in the series.

Thanks again!

Kaya Özkaracalar said...

Hi there! Thnx for your kind & encouraging words.. Sorry that I neglected my blog just when you had discovered it. In the past few days, I was devoting my spare time to contribute to online Disney index coa, but will be returning to my own blogging from now on. Cheers