Walter Lantz New Funnies #134
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeWalter Lantz New Funnies #134 (1948) represents the fully consolidated form of one of Dell's most durable funny-animal anthologies — a series that had evolved over more than a decade from a superhero-and-strip-reprint title called The Funnies into an exclusive showcase for Walter Lantz's studio characters. By 1948, the rechristening of the book as Walter Lantz New Funnies with issue #109 was still recent, and this issue arrives at the moment when the roster of characters — Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda and Charlie Chicken, Oswald the Rabbit, and Homer Pigeon — had finally stabilized into the four-feature format that would define the comic for the next decade and a half. The issue also lands in the immediate aftermath of a notable editorial decision: the series had just retired the racially caricatured Lil' Eightball character (last appearing in issue #128, August 1947), reflecting community pressure and Dell's broader positioning as a publisher of wholesome, family-appropriate material. As such, #134 is a document of the series at a cultural turning point, carrying the post-Eightball lineup forward under the Walter Lantz brand.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The series that became Walter Lantz New Funnies originated in 1936 as The Funnies, a Dell title featuring adventure heroes and newspaper-strip reprints. It transitioned into the all-ages funny-animal anthology New Funnies with issue #65 in July 1942, then was rechristened Walter Lantz New Funnies starting with issue #109 in March 1946, at which point it shed remaining non-Lantz characters and became nearly exclusively a vehicle for Walter Lantz Studio properties. The comic was produced under the long-running Dell–Western Publishing partnership, in which Western handled editorial production while Dell financed and distributed; individual story and art credits for issues of this era are largely unrecorded in surviving documentation, making specific creator attribution for #134 difficult to confirm.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Walter Lantz New Funnies #134 was published in 1948 by Dell Comics as part of the long-running series that ran from issue #109 through #288 (March 1946 – April 1962).
- The series numbering continued directly from New Funnies (Dell, 1942 series), which itself evolved from the original The Funnies (1936), giving the title an unbroken lineage spanning more than two decades.
- By 1948, the book's core four-character roster — Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda (with sidekick Charlie Chicken), Oswald the Rabbit, and Homer Pigeon — had settled into a stable anthology format that would carry the title through the 1950s.
- Issue #134 appears just months after the retirement of Lil' Eightball from the series; that character's final appearance was issue #128 (August 1947), removed in response to pressure from the African-American community over its racially stereotypical depiction.
- Homer Pigeon, one of the anthology's four pillars by this era, had become a featured lead starting with issue #127, elevating a minor Lantz cartoon character — who debuted in the 1942 short 'Pigeon Patrol' — into a regular comic-book headliner.
- Charlie Chicken's permanent role as Andy Panda's comic-book co-star, established in late 1943, was a comics-original development; the character was created specifically to fill the anthology's page count once the title committed fully to Lantz properties.
- The comic was produced under the Dell–Western Publishing partnership, in which Western Publishing handled editorial and creative production while Dell financed and distributed — a highly successful model that, at its peak in the mid-1950s, gave Dell roughly a third of the total comic-book market.
- Walter Lantz actively cross-promoted the New Funnies comic in his theatrical cartoon shorts, embedding in-universe posters and billboards urging audiences to 'Read Walt Lantz New Funnies at all newsstands.'
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