Fairy Tale Parade #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFairy Tale Parade #4 is one of nine issues that together constitute one of the most artistically ambitious children's anthology comics of the Golden Age, placing a then-rising Walt Kelly — fresh from animating Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo at Disney — at the creative center of a Dell series that brought European and Near-Eastern folklore to young American readers in full color at a dime an issue. As one of the very few comic books of its era dedicated entirely to literary fantasy, the series as a whole (and #4 as a representative entry) helped carve out space for the imaginative, character-driven storytelling that Kelly would refine into the celebrated Pogo strip just a year later. The cover and interiors of this issue demonstrate Kelly's distinctive blend of storybook illustration traditions — echoing Golden Age illustrators like Arthur Rackham — with the economical visual storytelling of the comic page, a synthesis that was genuinely novel for 1942. Collectors and historians regard the entire Fairy Tale Parade run as a crucial early showcase for one of the medium's most important pre-Pogo voices.
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Walt Kelly joined Dell Comics in 1941 at age 28 after leaving Walt Disney Productions, where he had contributed to several animated features. The Fairy Tale Parade series — copyrighted in each issue by Dell editor Oskar Lebeck — was part of a broader program Kelly undertook at Dell producing fairy tale, nursery rhyme, and holiday comics. Issue #4, published with a cover date of December 1942–January 1943, was edited under Lebeck's oversight; the series ran for nine issues through March 1944, after which the concept continued in Dell's long-running Four Color title. Kelly is credited with writing or co-writing much of what he drew across the series, and his editorial introduction in issue #1 — almost certainly drafted by Lebeck — positioned Kelly as the defining artistic voice of the run from the very start.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by Dell with a cover date of December 1942–January 1943 (on-sale date sourced from the U.S. Copyright Office Catalog of Copyright Entries, Vol. 38).
- Copyright held by Oskar Lebeck, Dell's editor, consistent with every issue in the Fairy Tale Parade run.
- Cover art by Walt Kelly; interior stories and art credited to Walt Kelly, Arthur Jameson, and L. Bing.
- The issue contains six stories: 'The Lost Prince,' 'The White Cat,' 'Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp,' 'The Travelling Musicians of Bremen' (Brothers Grimm), 'The Wee Men o' the Glen,' and 'The Giant's Hand.'
- Walt Kelly — at the time a former Disney animator who had worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo — served as the series' lead artist and primary creative voice across all nine issues.
- The Fairy Tale Parade series ran for nine issues from 1942 to 1944, then continued via six appearances in Dell's Four Color series in 1945–1946.
- Kelly's work on Fairy Tale Parade directly preceded his creation of Pogo, who first appeared in Dell's Animal Comics in 1943; the expressive anthropomorphic character work Kelly developed across the series is widely seen as formative for that strip.
- IDW Publishing, under Craig Yoe's editorial direction, collected Kelly's contributions from all nine Fairy Tale Parade issues (along with related Four Color issues) in the 2015 hardcover Walt Kelly's Fairy Tales, which won the Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project – Comic Books in 2016.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Walt Kelly's Fairy Tales #[nn] (2015)
Key issues in Fairy Tale Parade
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