Disney’s Silly Symphonies comic strip of the 1930s would not be my go-to place for veiled references to weapons of mass destruction, hobo philosophy, trench warfare or impoverished ghettoes. Much to my surprise, the first year of this brand extension of the studio’s hit animated short series included all of those dark themes and more.

Most of the 1932 to 1945 newspaper version of Silly Symphonies (later Silly Symphony) was exactly what one would expect, a crossover from Disney’s popular talkie cartoon series that amplified and mimicked the core property. Disney was already a master media synergist. Many of the 30s strips echoed situations from the more popular shorts. The Mickey Mouse strip launched simultaneously with a similar intent, but cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson quickly turned Mickey into a bona fide adventure strip hero with a journey of his own. Symphonies was done in-house rather than licensed out to syndicator King Features. At first, animator Ed Duvall handled writing and penciling, while Al Taliaferro inked. Soon, Duvall left the studio, so Taliaferro assumed all artwork, while the writing passed on to Ted Osborn. The animation series did not have a continuous world or cast but tended to anthropomorphize animals, bugs or objects in some music-driven standalone story.

The Silly Symphonies shorts may have represented the Mouse Factory’s purest animated product – driven by innovative cartoon physics, visualized musical riffs, cartooning unconstrained by the realistic demands of character and dense storylines. For the strip, Duval started in the insect world and invented Bucky Bug, the first Disney character who hadn’t originated in its cartoons. This was followed by another non-cartoon creation, Donald Duck, which Taliaferro introduced in Silly Symphonies in 1934.

Translating the imaginative verve and musical energy of the film brand into a Sunday strip was a tall order. Visually, it was a colorful delight, with a highly polished art style that made many competing strips seem amateurish. Duvall and Taliaferro did not have the gift for poetic action that Gottfredson brought to Mickey Mouse, to be sure. But they did leverage all of the land-of-the-giants tricks they could muster. Safety razors become farming plows. Teaspoons become cooking cauldrons. Pencils get chopped into firewood. Discarded top hats become luxury condos for the bug elite. And in an attempt to translate the cartoon’s musical identity to the strip, one of its signature conceits was rhyming. All narration and character speech was rendered in a simple, nursery-rhyme form.

But Duvall also had an edge to his imagination. The strip began in early 1932 with familiar children’s lit conventions, as the studio deliberately pitched this newspaper version to a younger demo than the all-ages movie audience. Our young and timid boy bug goes off to find his self and the world, getting easily spooked by every new experience. He activates the newspaper readers by asking them to mail in suggested names for the strip’s wandering hero – which eventually becomes “Bucky”. But apparently the crushing reality of the Great Depression soon finds its way even into fairy tale bugdom. Bucky happens upon a bug hobo, who brings him to the ghetto “Junkville” and even tries to teach him about avoiding work and panhandling his dinner. Duvall is bringing into this fantasy world some unmistakeable references to one of the darkest periods in our history. The Presidential election year of 1932 saw a post-Crash America bottoming out, with more than a quarter of the workforce unemployed, waves of migrant workers tramping the country as well as serious discussion of fascist and communist alternatives. This impoverished “Junkville” of society castoffs is an unmistakeable echo of the “Hoovervilles” of the 30s. These pop-up villages of displaced and homeless Americans took their name sardonically from then-President Herbert Hoover, who was widely blamed for America’s current mess. And like the hundreds of Hoovervilles cropping up around the country, Junkville is a makeshift mock town, built from the broken and cast-off items of a more fortunate middle class. And Bucky’s new hobo friend who leads him there, ‘Ol ‘Bo Bug, is himself an emblem of Depression America.

The hobo had been a fixture in American society since the mid-19th Century, both a sympton and response to industrial capitalism. Many “bo’s” were deliberately rejecting what they cojsidered the dehumanization of industrial work. They considered themselves migrant workers, with a code of polite and diligent behavior when they solicited day work as they migrated across the country. Variously reviled and romanticized in popular culture, the hobo lifestyle became especially relevant as so many Americans were involuntarily put on the road looking for work.

And here is where the conventional Disney conservatism kicks in. In short order, Bucky’s dalliance with hobo romance becomes a hymn to middle class industry and suburban conformity. On his first lesson in panhandling, Bucky eagerly jumps at the homeowner’s proposition to chop wook in exchange for pay. Our hobo soon proves to be a bit of a lovable con and a cocksman, even finding himself on the receiving end of a jealous husband’s shotgun. Meanwhile, Bucky’s true character unfolds as a thoroughly bourgeois bug: ambitious, hardworking, with an eye on scaling the social ladder. When he falls for the daughter of Junkville’s mayor, Bucky seeks his honor’s respect by thriving as the town blacksmith. Ol’ Bo teaches him the craft, and works alongside his friend for a while. But Bo soon succumbs to his “itch” for travel and romance and eventually takes to the rails. But in its own nursery rhyme way, Silly Symphonies seriously engaged some of the America’s enduring mythical tensions of town vs. country, ambition vs. hedonism, toil vs. dignity that the Depression aggravated. Ol’ Bo is the talented, dignified craftsman displaced by modernity. He carries with him honest skills and self-worth but finds modern structured work and social conformity too stifling. His response to his and Bucky’s new respectability in Junkville is to take for the rails.

But when Junkville goes to battle, things get truly, darkly weird. In an act of unabashed nepotism, the Mayor appoints his prospective son-in-law General of the bug army just as the expansionist Flyburg declares war on Junkville. And this is no warm and cozy cartoon war, either. Both animation and comic strips were fixated on warring fantasy kingdoms in the 1930s. But most of these scenarios were cartoonish, bloodless satires of the backwardness of current European tensions. But in Duvall and Disney’s Junkville v. Flyburg contest, bugs died. The mayor sobs over the list of the memorialized dead.

This early Silly Symphonies version of war looked backward, using the still fresh memories of WWI. This war went on for months of intricate strategic and tactical detail. Duvall and Taliaferro gives us war maps, engage a corps of spider engineers to erect barbed webs. Caterpillar-powered gatling guns and halftracks mow down the fly hordes. This is a cartoon battlefield that does not spare the bodies of dead bugs. And like the Great War, this one grinds to an entrenched stalemate where the Flies resort to using poison gas. When the resourceful allies jerry rig a house fan to send the gas back at ’em, the war finally winds to a close.

But what a strange trip it has been – putting the high polish of Disnified fantasy visuals on a storyline that alludes to both the Depression and the last war in sometimes grisly ways. Initial writer Ed Duvall seems to have been the mid behind these storylines. He left the studio for unexplained reasons shortly after starting the Silly Symphonies strip, and the strip’s darker allusions petered. Bucky got married, settled down, and the strip moved on to more fairy tale fare. Before doing so, however, it took a final shot at Depression-era tropes. Bucky’s parents are evicted from their home by a rapacious blackbird banker who calls in their mortgage.

And otherwise, Silly Symphonies goes on to follow its original aim – synergize the Disney cartoon releases, proselytize the Disney worldview. For a brief, shining moment, however, the strips appeared to have been hijacked for a dark but satisfying sojourn into cultural relevance.