Number 605


The tricksters


DC's funny animal comics used a lot of trickster stories. It's probably because they were common in animated cartoons and they came from a common source, folk tales.

Dodo and the Frog were like the Fox and the Crow. One always tricking the other. It's amazing to me that the writers could come up with so many variations on the same theme. Dodo and the Frog were drawn by Otto Feuer, a moonlighting animator. Two more Dodo and the Frog stories, these from the 1940s, are here.

The other story, Dizzy Dog, is by Sheldon "Shelly" Mayer, DC's all-around cartoonist, a creative person who had been at one time or another an editor, writer, and artist at DC, from the time he was a teenager until he succumbed to old age.

The two stories are from The Dodo and the Frog #80, 1954, and my thanks go out to David Miller for providing the scans.

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Number 448


"...a smarter moron..."


Dodo and the Frog was a popular feature for DC Comics during the heyday of funny animal comics, the 1940s and '50s. It was drawn by animator Otto Feuer, born in 1907 in Germany, who died in the U.S. at age 91.

Where would funny animal comics have been without animators who moonlighted? They understood pacing, storytelling, gags. Feuer had a very attractive style. He kept his layouts and panels simple and instantly readable, and understood the use of white space. His characters were silly, as are the stories. They're fun!

These two strips come from a coverless copy of DC's Funny Stuff. I don't know the issue number, so I've included an in-house ad with other comics from DC's funny animal line. Grand Comics Database doesn't have this issue indexed. Maybe someone out there can identify the issue for me.

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