When Edward handed me this book within a stack of them to read and review for my graphic novel project, I had to wonder what I might possibly find in a comic book about Snagglepuss. And yes, I'm talking about the pink puma I watched decades ago on Hanna-Barbera cartoons who sounded on a series of Cocoa Crispies commercials so much like Bert Lahr that Kellogg's was required to identify the voice actor, Daws Butler, on screen as part of a legal settlement reached after Lahr sued them for misrepresentation. Heavens to Murgatroyd, you might say! Well, this book is a reinvention to reinvent reinventions, even. It's quite the surprise.

Playing into longrunning fan interpretations of the character's colour, voice and mannerisms, the author, Mark Russell, doesn't just make him gay but a thespian who's become a national treasure of a playwright. He caught the attention of Lila Lion enough to marry her, but theirs is a marriage of convenience, maybe a lavender marriage, and he prefers the company of a Cuban emigre called Pablo with whom he spends time at the Stonewall. Unfortunately, this is 1953 and the House Un-American Activities Committee's communist witch hunts are in full swing. As the book begins with Snagglepuss an unfriendly witness to that committee, we're thrown right into the history, though he delivers his reprimands and deflections in the politest language, delivering exquisite witticism after another.

As you might imagine from that paragraph, this is a heady mixture of real and fictional characters interacting in real and fictional environments to illustrate how crazy the fifties really were in the United States. Is there much more of a story than that? Not really, but that's story enough. When various characters we recognise make it through the story alive to become the cartoons we know them as, they've already lived lives enough for most people, ably illustrating that nobody was too high to be cut down to size by the un-American hate machine. The lucky ones only find themselves blacklisted.

There's a useful cheat sheet (Historical Glossary) after the cover gallery in this DC Comics graphic novel collection of the six comic books from the original 2018 run. I didn't see it until I'd read the rest of the book, but recognised most of what it explains. The bits I didn't get are wild indeed, the Garst Cornfield War being the precise sort of thing that's too ridiculous to be believable. It's said that fiction has to be believable but non fiction only has to be true and this is a great example of something that only works in fiction because it's non fiction. And yes, I say that in a book about a gay pink puma testifying to Congress.

How much you enjoy this book may depend on how much you already know about what went down in the fifties in the United States. If you know a lot, then this is going to seem rather familiar, with the history with which you're familiar given fresh emphasis when applied to the anthropomorphic animals we know from Hanna Barbera cartoons. If you don't know much at all, then this is going to be an eye opener. You may believe that it's entirely fictional, or maybe even a retrofitted past to explain our dystopian present, but you'll find when you get to that Historical Glossary that almost everything you've just read really happened not that many generations ago.

Lillian Hellman really did testify to HUAC. Dorothy Parker probably didn't really have dinner with Snagglepuss but she's real otherwise. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg really were sentenced to death as Soviet spies. Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev really were prominent Cold War politicians who met in person in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Marilyn Monroe you know, of course, but she really was married to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio before taking up with Arthur Miller, playwright. The Stonewall was a real place and so was Doom Town, though there were lots of those. I'm sure Snagglepuss didn't fire Clint Eastwood off the stage and recommend he speak with a more breathy voice and try out westerns, but maybe somebody did.

And if that all sounds like a heavy dive into history, there are plenty of other cartoon characters to notice too. Augie Doggie gets an early cameo as a writer. He builds substantially over the book, after Snagglepuss gets him a job as a script boy in his latest stage production. I should mention in passing that Snagglepuss appeared in the 'Augie Doggie and Doggy Daddy' cartoon so early that he was still called Snaggletooth at the time. Novelist Huckleberry Hound comes to visit; he's also gay but lost in his sexuality until Snagglepuss takes him to the Stonewall, where he hooks up with Quick Draw McGraw, naturally a police horse here. Squiddly Diddly plays guitar at a nursing home. Peter Potamus is Snaggletooth's memorable producer.

And, of course, the two sides of this coin mix and mingle. Snaggletooth and Huckleberry Hound go to a party at Peggy Guggenheim's and chat with Lillian Hellman after her testimony, finding that she's been blacklisted. Snagglepluss plays a crucial part in the love triangle between Monroe and DiMaggio and Miller. He even fires a young actor off the stage, recommending that he speak with a more breathy voice and try out westerns instead. He's not an actor. He's a star. You'll recognise him quickly as Clint Eastwood. I wonder if that happened for real, albeit with a human playwright.

Mark Russell has fun shoehorning all these characters, real and fictional, into the same spaces, to generate drama and story, and that works shockingly well. It's immediately entertaining, even if it starts at a Congress hearing. It's notably educational, even without seeming to be. And it's very well grounded. Everything about the Cold War is grounded in game theory, Herman Kahn being a name I didn't recognise in the story but made sense in the Historical Glossary. Even there, it plays differently to either side, two quotes highlighting that. In America: "In game theory, sometimes being stupid gives you a real edge." In Russia: "The man who draws second is a dead man."

My very favourite moment isn't actually explained, even in the Historical Glossary, and that's the name of a major prosecutor for HUAC, fictional but based on the very real lawyer Roy Cohn. She's a fanatic and she drives much of the story forward, so can fairly claim to be responsible for where many of these characters end up. We're introduced to her with, "whose very name is synonymous with virtue and good taste", making it a joy to see her name be Gigi Allen. What this book doesn't tell us but hopes that we'll notice is that that's a pun on G. G. Allin, a punk rocker who defecated regularly on stage, had a habit of slicing himself bloody while performing and was often locked up for literally fighting his audience members during gigs. I adore that his legacy tarnishes HUAC as a pun in this book. They would hate it, which makes it all the better.

And, after all is said and done, there's much to take from this to apply to where we are today. The most telling line for me wasn't one from Snagglepuss but from his Cuban lover, Pablo, warning of what was happening in the States with reference to what was happening in Cuba. "Every nation," he says, "is a monster in the making. And monsters will come for you whether you believe them or not." That's particularly topical in our present, especially with ICE, three quarters of a century on from this earlier dark time. So yeah, this is a comic book about Snagglepuss. It's also a lot more than that. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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