Ha Ha Comics #1 is a sixty-page anthology of short funny-animal gag strips, published with an October 1943 cover date at ten cents. The issue runs a dozen unconnected features rather than a single lead story: Pete Parrot as a bumbling rookie policeman, Bow-Wow Beagle in a straight-faced parody of the hardboiled detective, the medieval spoof Robin Rabbit, plus one-off pieces like Pat the Potato Bug, Ralph Rooster, and Corn-Ona-Cub. Several stories are built directly around the American home front — Pete Kitten's Victory Drive and an animals-for-victory story fold scrap drives and war-effort enthusiasm into the slapstick, which was standard practice for children's comics published at the height of the war. The cover is by Jim Tyer, the Terrytoons animator whose rubbery, elastically deformed figure work is one of the most recognizable styles of the period.

The publishing context matters as much as the contents. Ben Sangor had been producing promotional comics since 1941 and moved to newsstand publishing with investors; the company was named Creston after the street where its nominal owners, Gerald and Andrew Albert, grew up. Wartime paper rationing forced the operation to secure newsprint from Canada and to keep output narrow — essentially funny-animal and adventure titles, of which Ha Ha Comics and Giggle Comics both launched with October 1943 cover dates, at a moment when superhero sales were softening. Creston was absorbed as an ACG imprint in 1943, and by 1948 the books were appearing under the American Comics Group name. The company later became better known for something else entirely: ACG published the medium's first ongoing horror title, Adventures into the Unknown.

For a modern reader, the appeal is partly archaeological and partly the art. Ha Ha Comics functioned as a moonlighting outlet for working animation staff — the credits across the run include Dan Gordon, Ken Hultgren, Bob Wickersham, Preston Blair, Hawley Pratt, and even a story by Looney Tunes writer Mike Maltese — so the drawing is often noticeably better than the throwaway material warranted. The title ran 99 issues from October 1943 to the December 1954/January 1955 cover date. Issue #1 is the entry point to that run, and because it sits squarely in the war years, it doubles as an unusually candid record of how the industry sold patriotic duty to eight-year-olds: not through soldiers, but through a parrot in a police uniform and a beagle in a trenchcoat.