Funnybooks is the story of the most popular American comic books of the 1940s and 1950s, those published under the Dell label. For a time, Dell Comics Are Good Comics was more than a sloganit was a simple statement of fact. Many of the stories written and drawn by people like Carl Barks (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge), John Stanley (Little Lulu), and Walt Kelly (Pogo) repay reading and rereading by educated adults even today, decades after they were published as disposable entertainment for children. Such triumphs were improbable, to say the least, because midcentury...