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Friday, March 10, 2006

Wild Animals #1 [1982] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre
Wild Animals #1 [1982]

This was a one-shot funny animal anthology edited by Scott Shaw! and published by Pacific Comics. The main purpose for the book seems to be to provide a venue for Shaw! (then drawing CAPTAIN CARROT for DC) to publish the lead story, a "You-All Gibbon" story originally written in 1978, continuing the story that appeared in QUACK #3 from Star-Reach.

(I'm almost certain there's a joke in the name "You-All Gibbon" that made sense in the 1970s that I'm missing)

Anyway, the story opens with our here, the Junk-Food Monkey has been standing at the tunnel entrance to "The Land That Time Ignored", a valley of dinosaurs, for five years now. Hey, you'd be shocked, too...



A pretty frantic story follows, containing a Tarzan parody, Pigfoot, a giant robot, a Hunter Thompson parody, Dogzilla and lot of dinosaurs. The preceding stories in QUACK were pretty good, but this final one is a lot better, especially thanks to the colour (provided by Gordon Kent).

A lot of short bits from various creators follow. Larry Gonick, of A CARTOON HISTORY... fame, does a really funny four-page dinosaur story which always cracks me up. Sergio Aragones does a cute two-pager with gorillas, and who doesn't like gorillas by Aragones? Jim Engel provides several single page stories, my favourite being "Lackluster Lizard", for the line "dat's Beetle Bailey swearing" if nothing else. Rick Geary does an odd backcover poster of the Presidents of the US, only with realistic animal portraits. Other contributors are Brian Narelle and George Erling, who I'm not familiar with, but nothing is less than amusing in here.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:23 pm

    "You-All Gibbon" is a parody of the late naturalist Yul Gibbons, who had some degree of fame in the 1970s. The Internet says he appeared in a Grape Nuts cereal commercial.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah, thanks for clearing that up. One of those minor mental irritants gone.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1:15 am

    You're welcome! I should point out that I misspelled his name earlier. You can read a bit about him on this Wikipedia page.

    ReplyDelete

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