George Scarbo was an interesting artist. He made his name as a caricaturist in the thirties and did many panels using that skill. I have wrtten about him a couple of times and shown some of his stuff, all pretty remarkable. In the forties, he created a Sunday feture with animals for the NEA syndicate and continued doing it for many years. I have come across a lot of them in the various microfiches files I go through to get strips like Scorchy Smith and Patsy in Hollywood, but I rarely clip them because it usually is to dark. Apparently, the secondary color scheme Scaro used doesn't really survive the microfiche process all that well. On the back of a longer run of another strip I came across a lot of color samples of The Comic Zoo. So many that it took me wuite a while to scan them and prepare them to be put here. I considered doing it in two posts, but frankly, I do not think the strip is special enough to warrent double attention. Scarbo seemed to treat his animals as caricatures rather than portraits or cute depections. And there wil be some that will find his distinct non-Disney approach interesting. But he does cover the same terrain as Walt Kelly would do only a few years later and he is no Walt Kelly. Then again, almost no one was. So here is the largest run of The Comic Zoo you will ever see anywhere - including here.
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