Five days a week, my pal Scott Shaw! posts an unusual comic book cover over at Comic Book Resources and provides clever and informative commentary. In this installment, he features a comic called Foxy Fagan that was drawn by the late Harvey Eisenberg, one of the great unsung cartoonists. Eisenberg was the main artist on the Tom & Jerry comics published by Dell and Gold Key, as well as many of the Hanna-Barbera comics from the same company. He was amazingly prolific, especially when you realize that for much of the time, he was moonlighting from animation studios. Among other gigs, he had a lot to do with the look and feel of the early Hanna-Barbera shows. (One day when we were both working at the studio, Scott found the original artwork to the storyboards for the first Top Cat episode — drawn by H. Eisenberg — and a full set of stats in a dumpster out back. Scott kept the originals for himself, natch, but was nice enough to give me the stats. They're very detailed, since they were used in the sale of the show, and you can see where the lead character's name has been changed. Originally, the show was going to be called Top Cats — plural, referring to them all — and the Bilko-like ringleader was going to be called J.B., as in "Joe Barbera.")
Anyway, Eisenberg was great and his work is avidly studied by animation artists, especially his knack for posing characters so they have weight and movement. His son Jerry is now one of the best designers in the animation business, and one of these days I want to drag him to a San Diego Convention and have him participate in one of those "Quick Draw" cartooning wars we stage there.
Anyway, the other interesting thing about Foxy Fagan is that the comic was published by a short-lived company called Dearfield Publishing. I don't think it's ever been mentioned in any history of comics or animation anywhere, but this company was co-owned by Harvey Eisenberg and Joe Barbera. Yes, that Joe Barbera. Their names apparently appear nowhere on any of their comics because the two of them were then under contract to MGM — Barbera, producing and directing Tom & Jerry cartoons; Eisenberg, designing and doing key layouts. But they got together on the sly and put out some comics, and Barbera at least created some of the characters if he didn't actually write some of the scripts. As far as I know, Scott is the first historian to ever report this anywhere.