A Mob! A Lavender Scare! A Witch Hunt even!

The Snagglepuss Chronicles: Exit Stage Left by Mark Russell, illustrated by Mike Feehan and Mark Morales.
Graphic Novel Review by Kerey McKenna.

DC Comics has been doing some interesting things for the last few years with their stewardship of the Hanna-Barbara cartoon characters. Some choices seem fairly straightforward from the point of view of corporate synergy, like launching Future Quest, a massive crossover event linking action-based characters like Johnny Quest to the Herculoids. Or getting superheroes like Birdman and Space Ghost back to their jobs as superheroes instead of self-referential parodies on Cartoon Network. Scooby Doo was re-imagined as post-apocalyptic survival horror. The Jetsons and The Flintstones were both reconstructed into dramedies (See my review of the latter here).

But in The Snagglepuss Chronicles: Exit Stage Left, classic Hanna-Barbara characters Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, and the titular Snagglepuss are placed in a scenario I never would have expected: a drama about homosexuality and politics in the McCarthy Era. The premise is so out there it hit with all the surprise of an El Kabong attack.

With both sides of the political aisle invoking the shadow of McCarthyism, and the contentious issue of writing previously straight comic characters as gay or bisexual (Alan Scott the Green Lantern, Iceman of the X-Men, and the Rawhide Kid to name a few), I thought this might be an interesting read.

So first things first: who was Snagglepuss originally and why reboot him into a period piece about the 1950’s? I must confess I only have vague memories of this cartoon character and even then only as a supporting member of Hanna-Barbara cartoons that brought their funny animals into one big story, with Yogi Bear getting top billing. I could only remember the pink lion having a laid back attitude and a collection of catch phrases and verbal affectations like “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” “Exit Stage Left!” and his signature conjunction “even.”

In the comics world there is a bit of debate (either a raging storm or a tempest in a teapot depending on who you ask) about writing previously established characters as gay or bisexual. One argument against the trend is that it subverts original authorial intent, creating character traits and interpretations that had never been there. In this case though, I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that the original character of Snagglepuss had a lot of subtext. He’s a pink lion that’s in show biz and sounds like this:

Yeah, that is one dandy lion. In fact a lot of his verbal shtick invokes Bert Lahr’s portrayal of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939) (Lahr actually sued).

Okay, so what does the graphic novel do with this walking collection of gay stereotypes? Well, it tries to turn him into a complex fully rounded character that is living as a closeted gay man in the 1950’s. Well, a gay lion-man anyway.

Seemingly following in the footsteps (or paw prints?) of Netflix cartoon Bojack Horseman, the world of Snagglepuss is a world in which animal people and humans exist side-by-side with no explanation given or really needed. Also like Bojack, Snagglepuss is a celebrity and he mixes and mingles with real celebrities of the era. Parallel to Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, Snagglepuss left his boyhood home in the rural south for the bright lights of New York City to pursue a career in theater and the emerging gay scene.

Establishing himself as a celebrated playwright, Snagglepuss straddles the line of what is acceptable in the 1950’s. To keep up appearances, he has a marriage of convenience to a lioness to serve as his beard, but his reputation is such that Joe DiMaggio is not concerned with Snagglepuss spending time with his knockout of a bride Marilyn Monroe (turns out Jumpin’ Joe should have been watching out for another NYC playwright, Arthur Miller).

However Snagglepuss’s place in society is threatened when the House Un-American Activities Committee wants him to name names and point them towards communist sympathizers from his social circle.

The story explores the intermingling of art and politics and the tension between conformity and freedom, from the individual to the societal level. Even if Snagglepuss can survive the pressure with his characteristic nonchalance, can his near and dear ones survive the ordeal intact? Can he maintain his ideals and still keep his name off the infamous blacklist?

In a daring move, the book takes this premise and plays it completely straight. Well, not completely straight.

The creators use the “funny animals” to act out a mature adult drama, something that has been done since at least the 1970's in the independent comics scene (Fritz the Cat, Maus, and Blacksad, to name a few), but to my knowledge this has never before been done with mainstream established characters. One wonders why the creators chose to do this when a little tweaking here and there could have made them recognizable analogues but more distinct. However, there’s a method to their madness.

Metaphorically, film and television compress flesh and blood actors into cartoon versions of their public personas. Breathy blond bombshell Marilyn Monroe has been immortalized in film, but the public doesn’t really remember Norma Jean, the stuttering, insecure factory worker, the real person who couldn’t bear the weight of constantly being Marilyn. Similarly, in this novel, the “funny animals” we know and love from our childhoods, always taking pratfalls and getting in and out of trouble, lived complex lives before being preserved forever as cartoons.

The art and dialogue are superb, but I did have a few bones to pick about the book’s politics and reading of the pertinent history. My issues aren’t that it is a political book, or even most of the politics involved, but rather a matter of historical accuracy: I was disappointed that the creators ignored or omitted aspects of the history that would have made the tale a bit more nuanced and projected less of a modern mindset onto the past.

My first point of contention is whether Snagglepuss really needed a beard. Although most gay men in the 1950s did live in the closet—the conformism of the era, sadly, made that necessary—there were exceptions, including some members of professions considered to be “eccentric”—like writers. As I mentioned, Snagglepuss here is clearly based off real life writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, both of whom at the time this novel was set were living openly as homosexuals, or at least as openly as a man could in that time and place.

There is also some modern projection in that the politics of the gay community as portrayed in the book are drawn along modern battle lines. The story features two gay members of the supporting cast on opposite sides of the political spectrum: Snagglepuss’s Latin lover Pablo the Cuban revolutionary, and Gigi Alan an anti-communist government operative (and barely closeted lesbian). Gigi is the Inspector Javert of the story, diligently working to root out Communist sympathizers even if she has to out closeted homosexual men. She appears to be a gender-swapped version of McCarthy operative Roy Cohn. Pablo fled the oppression of the Batista Regime but runs off to Cuba to join the Communist Revolution; by the end of the story we find him having adopted a bushy beard and military fatigues, and working diligently as an official within the Castro Regime. In real life Pablo is going to be in for a real shock when he finds that the violent government crackdowns on homosexuality won’t just continue under the Castro regime but perhaps even increase. He himself might very well be purged from the regime and imprisoned in a labor camp. The graphic novel is so focused on the Lavender Scare in the US it makes the mistake of assuming that the grass was greener on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Again I feel like a dramatic opportunity may have been missed here. With a few lines of dialogue the actions of Gigi Allen (who I don’t think the authors wanted us to see as a complete villain) would make a bit more sense. Yes, she is defending a system that does not make life easy for people like her, but looking at the persecution of homosexuals in the USSR and Soviet Bloc States she could rationalize that communist rule would be much worse.

There is also the issue of Snagglepuss’s trademark idiom. In a book about a character whose most memorable aspect is his verbal mannerisms, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to imagine this version of Snagglepuss speaking with his classic inflection. I feel like a visual flourish or two could have indicated times when Snagglepuss was speaking with his characteristic affectations vs when he is speaking more naturally (perhaps even indications that he reverts to a southern accent when in private or under stress). It seems like a missed opportunity. A mistake. A misstep. A faux paw, even.

But in general I liked this book’s daring in trying to take so many risks with characters that had previously always existed as lighthearted cartoons. As I said, subversions of “funny animal” stories have been a fixture of the independent comic scene for decades. But even a more mainstream success like Bojack Horseman feels the need to zigzag between maudlin existential dread and madcap slapstick and puns. In consistently using these characters for a serious period piece, The Snagglepuss Chronicles show that “gritty reboot” doesn’t need to mean “add more muscles, guns, and swearing.”

Should classic cartoon and comic book characters be rewritten as gay or bisexual? And does it make a difference if the original character already "had a lot of subtext?" Please leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.