Snagglepuss has been reimagined as a closeted gay playwright and he’s got his own series
Overgrown kids of a certain age will definitely remember a pink mountain lion called Snagglepuss.
The classic Hanna-Barbera character first appeared back in 1959.
He first featured as a character in The Quick Draw McGraw Show and was later a regular on The Yogi Bear Show in his own segments.
Later he was the co-host of Hanna-Barbera’s Laff-A-Lympics.
Earlier this year, it first emerged that Mark Russell would be re-imagining the character as “a gay Southern Gothic playwright”.
“I envision him like a tragic Tennessee Williams figure; Huckleberry Hound is sort of a William Faulkner guy, they’re in New York in the 1950s, Marlon Brando shows up, Dorothy Parker, these socialites of New York from that era come and go,” he told HiLoBrow.
Related: 20 superheroes you probably didn’t know were LGBT
Of the character’s sexuality in the older cartoons, he added: “Yeah, it’s never discussed and it’s obviously ignored in the cartoons ’cuz they were made at a time when you couldn’t even acknowledge the existence of such a thing, but it’s still so obvious; so it’s natural to present it in a context where everybody knows, but it’s still closeted.”
The character went on to appear in this year’s Suicide Squad/Banana Splits Annual #1, talking to Aunt Doggy.
And now Russell’s Snagglepuss is getting his own series.
Launching in January 2018, the DC miniseries is titled Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles.
There are two covers for the first issue, one by Ben Caldwell and another by Evan ‘Doc’ Shaner.
“Snagglepuss in this story is having to live a double life as a gay playwright living in New York, and he’s closeted,” Russell told The Hollywood Reporter.
“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.”
