PRIDE MONTH 2024! One of the opportunities that our Pride Month celebrations provide each year is allowing us to revisit work that we may have missed the first time around. In an age of relatively easy digital accessibility for serial comics this also allows us to add coverage of these titles to our Broken Frontier Resource Lists. In this case, obviously, to our specific LGBTQIA+ list of relevant reviews and features. One such title to retrospectively write about this year is Mark Russell and Mike Feehan’s Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, undoubtedly one of the finest treatments of queer history in genre fiction comics in recent memory.
Launched as part of DC Comics’ Hanna-Barbera line a few years back it seems quite astonishing now that Russell and Feehan had the freedom they did to re-imagine TV cartoon characters like Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw as players in a mature and sophisticated historical drama, replete with the most potent social commentary. While the DC Hanna-Barbera line was launched to sceptical reaction, and not every series was a winner, it threw up a number of unlikely gems, including The Flintstones (also written by Russell) and Scooby Apocalypse.
Set in 1953 Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles recasts Snagglepuss as a gay, Southern playwright in an era when the Red Menace is supposedly everywhere and the House Un-American Activities Committee has set its sights on rooting out subversive elements in showbusiness. With a new play about to open, Snagglepuss is in a sham marriage while his friend Huckleberry Hound is similarly living a lie and in a relationship with police officer Quick Draw McGraw. In this world where humans and anthropomorphic animals exist together, paranoia is mounting and Snagglepuss’s friends and associates, including Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker, find themselves in an unwelcome spotlight too.
Mark Russell has proved himself time and again as both a great satirist and an incisive social commentator. While Exit Stage Left was published back in 2018 its relevance in terms of parallels to the ongoing “culture wars” of the 2020s is indisputable. Historical figures like Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller co-exist here with pop cultural faves like Augie Doggie and Peter Potamus. Moral and socio-political questions abound. Are we forever doomed to repeat the same cycles of oppression and toxicity? What does it actually mean to be an American? What possesses someone to persecute a marginalised group despite being part of that group themselves? What responsibilities does the individual have to stand up to discrimination when in doing so they will endanger their own safety?
Russell imbues Snagglepuus with a jaded, worldweary line in cynical dialogue, a constant stream of epigrams delivered with a Wildean flourish. Anthropomorphism as a storytelling device, of course, is an expressive tool with a wonderfully cutting storytelling edge, given that by wrapping very real human traits up in the trappings of the feline or the canine that humanity becomes all the more pronounced. There’s a pivotal moment of betrayal in the story between two of those much loved cartoon properties, for example, that is perhaps the key thematic scene in the entire story and when it hits home it’s with an emotional intensity that is just devastating.
Mike Feehan’s pencils are a most appropriate blend of realism and absurdity, giving us an America where the required suspension of disbelief that humanoid animals and people exist together is never challenged. This, of course, is no mean feat given that the cartoon leads have more expressively restricted features and thus their body language becomes just as important in communicating their feelings and moods at any given time.
This is darkly comedic work but one that still has time to deliver the odd Easter Egg (an in-story explanation for why in his original appearances the pink-furred Snagglepuss was portrayed as the orange-furred Snaggletooth is a nice nod to the character’s origins). But for the most part the humour is forever soaked in a claustrophobic grimness as Russell weaves historical events and locales like the Stonewall Inn, nuclear weapons, Cuba, and the execution of the Rosenbergs into the tale. In a small masterstroke the funniest scenes in a traditional sense come from the depiction of actual events – Khrushchev and Nixon debating the relative merits of Soviet and US kitchens at a trade fair, for example, or the ludicrousness of the “Garst Cornfield War.”
Earlier this week as part of our Pride Month celebrations at Broken Frontier we covered Trujillo and Hastings’ Washington’s Gay General, another long-form comics work with queer historical themes. Like that offering Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles also deals with ideas of gay erasure, albeit from a somewhat different perspective. It fully deserved the multiple awards that it went on to win (including a Broken Frontier Award for Best Limited Series). Despite its unlikely source material this remains one of the most vitally important releases in queer comics genre fiction in recent years.
Mark Russell (W), Mike Feehan, Mark Morales, Sean Parsons, José Marzán Jr, Howard Porter (A), Paul Mounts, Steve Buccellato (C), Dave Sharpe (L), Ben Caldwell (CA) • DC Comics, $16.99
Review by Andy Oliver
Read our Pride 2024 articles all in one place here
Check out our LGBTQIA and Trans and Non-Binary Resource Lists here
