Mickey Klar Marks's Zany Giraffe

Mickey Klar Marks donated her papers to the University of Southern Mississippi, and an inventory is online. These are not records like William Woolfolk's notebook, but rather copies--I suppose carbons--of her scripts, with a notation on each as to the publisher who bought it.

For comic books Marks wrote mostly fiction text pieces, but she did write a few comics stories. The Zany Giraffe series in Novelty's, later Premium's, Frisky Fables is hers. Although the installments were published without titles, these are her working ones. The only byline on each was "art by Jim Adams."

The story hook in each episode is that Zany is the only one who can solve a problem for the forest creatures but since giraffes have no vocal cords, it takes some effort to get his idea across.

Zany Giraffe's strip appeared on-and-off. I believe these are all of the strip's original appearances. There are a handful of scripts in the USM collection that seem to have gone unpublished: Zany Earns a Badge; Zany Giraffe, American; A New Twist; and Zany Takes a Stand. I can't reconcile any with the Spots story. [UPDATE: It wasn't labeled as a Zany story in the collection; here's Marks's working title replacing my description. The character is named Spots in the published story itself; Spot is the dog in Novelty's Speck, Spot and Sis series.] However, the collection of papers may not not complete; there are some bylined text pieces of hers published whose typescripts are not at USM (at least under the published titles).

Zany Giraffe in Frisky Fables
written by Mickey Klar Marks

Win/46	v1 #3	Zany Engineers a Rescue
Apr/	v2 #1	Zany Solves a Mystery
July/	v2 #4	Zany Furthers Education
Sept/	v2 #6	Zany Almost Talks
Oct/	v2 #7	Zany and the Tigers
Nov/	v2 #8	Zany Starts a Trading Post
Feb/47	v2 #11	Zany Debunks a Ghost
Apr/	v3 #1	Zany Sticks His Neck Out
May/	v3 #2	The Taffy Pull
Aug/	v3 #5	Spot Sees Spots Before His Eyes
Oct/	v3 #7	Zany Giraffe Becomes Mayor
Dec/	v3 #9	Zany Helps Heat a House
Feb-Mar/49	v4 #7	Zany Stars in a New Role
Aug-Sept/	v5 #3	Zany Turns Nautical

Who Are Roppe?

The signature "Roppe" on the cover of Charlton's Davy Crockett #1 in 1955 is a portmanteau name like "Brangelina." In this case it's Mike Roy and Mike Peppe. The fact that they did the issue's first story (unsigned) gives more pages of art to corroborate the ID.

Roy and Peppe were doing a knock-off here of Fess Parker's Davy Crockett from "Disneyland"; a decade later they were drawing Parker as another frontiersman, as in the story tier above, from Gold Key's Daniel Boone 6 (Aug/66).

I assume this first issue is assembled out of inventory bought from one of those companies getting out of comics in the mid-Fifties, but I have no idea which. There are a Red Roan text story and Big Bow and Little Arrow humor piece from Fawcett, but Charlton mixed those into everything.

Roy and Peppe art on
Charlton's Davy Crockett

Aug/55	1	[cover]
		Indian Attack