Beauty Amazon

Top Cat and the Pleasures of NYC!

Exchanging comments with friend Debbie (who does the excellent web comic Fluffy and Mervin) on my recent Flintstones post put me in a Hanna-Barbera state of mind. I rummaged my stuff and found this great Little Golden Book from 1962, starring Top Cat and his gang.

The thing that was wonderful about the Little Golden Books was that when doing a cartoon like Top Cat, the artists involved often would stay very true to the orginal concept of the cartoon; whereas the Dell Four Color comics would stray a bit. In this tale, writer Carl Memling captures perfectly the urban quality that made Top Cat so awesome. Growing up in the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, I thought Top Cat was cooler than Elvis. The great team of Hawley Pratt and Al White (a very standard duo in Little Golden Books) do some very standard (for them) beautiful work page after page.