Crazy Like a Foxy

Foxy Fagan was a comic book published around 1947 by an obscure company called Dearfield Publishing. It never found an audience and ran only seven issues but it makes for quite an interesting bit of funnybook history. It was drawn by a gentleman named Harvey Eisenberg, who was one of the great draw-ers of silly creatures. He was the main artist for decades on the Tom & Jerry comic books, which were really good-looking comics. Eisenberg had a way of "posing" his characters that other cartoonists would avidly study. He gave them weight and personality and movement. He also did this with a lot of the comics based on the earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows like The Flintstones and Huckleberry Hound.

Even more intriguing is who his partner was in the Foxy Fagan enterprise. It was Joe Barbera, moonlighting (without credit) from his day job, which then was co-directing (with Bill Hanna) the Tom & Jerry cartoons for MGM. Barbera apparently got it into his head that there was money in publishing comic books, which of course was not one of Joe's sounder financial decisions. He and Eisenberg created the comic, he wrote it, Eisenberg drew it, Joe assembled a group of backers and put in some bucks of his own…and they lost a lot of money. I wrote about the endeavor some time ago in this item and my pal Scott Shaw! wrote about it here and reproduced some samples of the Foxy Fagan comic.

I bring this up again because the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive has scanned and posted a whole story from Foxy Fagan #1 and you can see it here. Go have a look. It's good stuff.