‘Snagglepuss Chronicles’ is best thing you’ll read. Seriously.
“The truth is, they will always find us, S.P. Whatever we do, wherever we hide, they’ll find us. We’re fools if we think otherwise. Our only choice in this life is to change the world, or be destroyed by it. And God help me, S.P., I’m not sure which one I prefer.” Huckleberry Hound
It’s hard to imagine that a modern rendition of Snagglepuss could be the most powerful and moving book of the year. I mean, he was the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character that most of us remember from childhood as a secondrate Sylvester the Cat. Yet, Mark Russell’s “The Snagglepuss Chronicles” is a masterpiece comic book that defies all expectations and hits home with a timely political commentary as raw as it is relevant.
The universe that Snagglepuss inhabits in the comics is very different from the lighthearted cartoons of the 1960s. In these pages, the Red Scare in America is in full swing. Snagglepuss, here portrayed as a stand-in for Tennessee Williams, is a successful playwright whose homosexual lifestyle is an open secret. Maintaining a pretend marriage as a cover, he is a frequent visitor to the Stonewall Inn and New York’s gay scene.
Everything that made Snagglepuss a beloved cartoon character is here. He is mincing, yet determined. He is urbane and witty. However, don’t try to wed the timeless voice of Daws Butler to the action. In this series, when Snagglepuss utters “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” or ripostes the House on Un-American
Activities in open court with puns, there’s the dark cynical Southern whimsy of Truman Capote at play. This Snagglepuss is someone who doesn’t whistle past graveyards; he marches past them with dancing girls and 76 trombones.
The approach helps to tame the sheer darkness of the comic. The story centers on a visit from Snagglepuss’ best friend from childhood, Huckleberry Hound, who is more or less William Faulkner in this reality.
Restrained and sweet where Snagglepuss is flamboyant, Huck tries to find love and life in New York after his own love affair with a man gets him driven from his home and son. Meanwhile, the HUAC, led by Gigi Allen, a woman who is determined to tear down the degeneracy that she sees threatening America in the form of perverted writers like S.P. and Huck.
Allen is a fascinating character. She’s based on Roy Cohn, chief counsel to Joe McCarthy and a man who later was a lawyer for Donald Trump. Both Cohn and Allen were themselves homosexuals, but dedicated their lives to the stamping out of the emerging gay rights movement.
The pain of hypocrisy is the most sinister villain in the book. In a world where humans and anthropomorphic animals coexist, marry and reproduce openly without any apparent judgment, homophobia looks beyond farcical. The threat of nuclear annihilation apparently hangs in the balance over whether or not Huckleberry Hound has sex with men, but is waved away completely as the famous “Kitchen Debate” happens over rotisserie chicken between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. Allen has a deep, pathological hatred of Snagglepuss because he is unashamedly who he is in a way she can’t be, and hold onto her power.
Through it all, though, is Snagglepuss, a hero of words and heart. He is kind to a fault, desperately looking to save everyone around him, from acting hopeful Augie Doggie to his friend Arthur Miller, who is trying to avoid a bludgeoning from Joe DiMaggio over Marilyn Monroe’s love. Snagglepuss does it with style, almost as if it’s all a joke, but it’s the quiet strength of the outcast that makes him superheroic.
Reading the book, you’re reminded of another great southern literary character, Atticus Finch, who said courage was “when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
Just as Miller jokes in the book that his “Crucible” is a metaphor for the Red Scare, “The Snagglepuss Chronicles” is a metaphor for the world we live in now. “Fake news,” “cultural Marxism” and “identity politics” have become the new right-wing bludgeons, and the only shield worth a damn is truth and a good sense of humor. The crime that the powers that be put on trial in this story are openness and a lack of shame, the proverbial “rubbing our faces in it.” Snagglepuss denies them his shame no matter the cost, like a foppish Ayn Rand hero.
It’s a breathtaking book, full of tragedy and wonder. Read it. Immediately.