COMIC BOOK STORY: The Fox and the Crow (Comic Cavalcade 31) (Patreon)

For the month of December, this Patreon will present a series of vintage holiday-themed comic book stories with licensed classic animated characters. This Yuletide special will start off with a story featuring The Fox and the Crow!

First appearing in Frank Tashlin’s The Fox and the Grapes (1941), Fauntleroy Fox and Crawford Crow appeared in a series of cartoons released by Screen Gems’ animation department, through Columbia Pictures. Based on the Aesop’s Fable of the same name, this cartoon is said to have inspired the “try/fail” template that became prevalent in animated cartoons in the forties and fifties, particularly Chuck Jones’ Road Runner/Coyote series.

The two appeared in a series of twenty cartoons throughout the 1940s at Screen Gems with another three at the emerging UPA studio, released in 1949 and 1950. Their pairing lent itself to the classic juxtaposition between the cultured and uncultured, characterizing Fauntleroy as a milquetoast intellectual often subjected to the brash Crawford’s trickery. In the comics, their interactions were relatively similar, but they were now shown as neighbors, with the Crow’s hollow tree in close vicinity to the Fox’s comfortable abode.

The Fox and the Crow had not appeared in another cartoon after 1950, but the comics became a long-running feature for DC up to the mid-1960s, with James (Jim) Davis as their main artist.

From Comic Cavalcade #31 (February-March 1949)—drawn and inked by James (Jim) Davis.