A childhood favorite is coming back a lot gayer.
DC Comics has gotten hold of the rights to the Hanna-Barbera character Snagglepuss and are getting ready to release an updated version of the character.
In the upcoming Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, which will be written by Mark Russell and have its art drawn by Mike Feenan, the titular character will be reimagined as a gay Southern playwright in the style of Tennessee Williams.
This reboot was announced earlier this year (along with the news that DC comics would be reimaginging several of the Hanna-Barbera characters such a Scooby Apocalypse and the already released Flinstones series).
In an interview with Heat Vision, Russell spoke about the inception of the story.
“It just kind of happened by accident. I was just tweeting funny lines I thought Snagglepuss would say if he was Tennessee Williams — some kind of Southern Gothic playwright — and Marie Javins, my editor, thought they were funny and she talked to Dan [Didio, DC co-publisher] about turning that into a comic. That's how it started. It was really just funny tweets, and it just ballooned from there.”
“The way I write him, he's kind of an avant-garde figure for the times — people kind of expect him to say things that are edgy, and witty. In a way, he's allowed to breach subjects and say things in 1953 in New York that other people simply could not.”
While the story will be a satire to modern life, it will take place in 1953.
“Snagglepuss in this story is having to live a double life as a gay playwright living in New York, and he's closeted,” Russell explains. “But he has values and integrity as an artist, and he's trying to stand up for people who otherwise would be shoved under the stairs in this time of great national paranoia in the Red Scare mentality. It's very easy in a time of national catastrophe — of perceived national catastrophe — to throw people under the sink and forget about them, and Snagglepuss is unwilling to let them do that to people he knows and loves. He's willing to stand up for people when the rest of the country is not.”
Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles #1 will go on sale this coming January in 2018.
