Some information will be slower to fill in than others. For example, the most recent stumbling block was Tabby. I prepped the image for Tabby's entry when doing the original blog posts for The Voice Of ODD!. At that time, the sources weren't very relevant so i wasn't meticulous in my notes. Going back to fill in the data, i couldn't find any reference to the character or strip in any comics database, despite hours of searching. (Much time can be spent searching for possible typos that could be hiding the information.) Finally, i came to realize that the comic from which it was sourced, Nutty Comics #3, remains un-indexed in the databases. (So, yeah - i'm compiling a complete issue index to submit.) It was only randomly flipping through old issues that finally found the source.
Hopefully, we'll eventually get it all.
And, yes - please do feel free to volunteer information not currently present, or suggest corrections where appropriate.
As noted to the right, this all started as a carried-away blog post after noticing how amazingly many Funny Animal characters were running around in comics back in the '40s. Even with 500 entries, we're nowhere near complete at this stage. We haven't even started to list the Big Names, like the Disney, Warner, and MGM critters, for example. Folks know them anyway, so they need listing the least. We'll get to them eventually.
Now that we've reached the 500 mark, it's time to go ahead and open up the doors, so we'll stop hiding from the search engines and Blogger. To celebrate, here's a lovely little poster of Cosmo Cat i found, signed by both Ellis Holly Chambers and Leonard Brandt Cole, both of whose work you can find throughout the Funny Animalphabet.
Here's a little bonus - I recently added Uncle Wiggily's first cover to his listing, but that image only shows the front of a wrap-around cover. Here's the entire cover to Animal Comics #2 for you to enjoy:
As always, throughout the Funny Animalphabet images are reduced to fit on the page, but full size viewing is only a click away.
The Navigation Menu is always at the top of the column to right, but here's one you may use now to get you started. Jump straight to the introduction or to any letter to view the listings. There's also a simple text list of entries on the Index page, as well as a text listing of applicable entries at the top of each letter's page. Hopefully that'll make browsing easier for you.
Cosmo Cat by Ellis Chambers & L.B. Cole (circa 1950), Funny Animals cover by unknown (1943)
That Cosmo Cat original is the only original Ellis Holly Chambers art that’s known to exist, I wonder if there are any other surviving artworks or anyone who knows things about him. Lots of mystery around him and his works. I consider Chambers a natural cartoonist-people like George Harriman and Bob Clampett and Milton Knight are also other examples of a term I came up with that describes someone who lives and breathes the classic cartoon form. It’d be great to see some other Chambers art that never got published, though alas that’s extremely unlikely.
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