Funland Comics #1 (1945) is a 36-page funny-animal anthology from the short-lived Croydon Publishing Co., and effectively a one-man showcase for Lou Ferstadt, who wrote, drew, and edited most of it. The issue opens with Skunky Shopkeeper, in which the skunk Skunky faces off against Willie Wolf, and continues through Angel Pussy (with Spatsy, Aunt Pussy, and the gangster Mugsy Twofinger), the knockabout duo Pretzel and Picklejuice, and The Cock Crows, a seven-page haunted-house romp starring Woody and Squeaky — the latter an unabashed Mickey Mouse knockoff. Rounding out the book are gag pages (It's Fun to Laugh, Laffs, Wit-nits) and two contributions from Sophie Freedman: the text story Patsy the Circus Cat and the Peeps strip The Bird Who Wanted to Swim.

Croydon was a marginal operation even by Golden Age standards — eight series, ten issues total, most of them one-shots, and Funland Comics never saw a second number. Ferstadt, meanwhile, is a genuinely remarkable figure: a Ukrainian-born muralist who painted the RCA Building and the Eighth Street subway station for the 1939 World's Fair, drew a regular strip for the Communist Party's Daily Worker, ran the Ferstadt Studio from 1942 to 1945 — where a teenage Harvey Kurtzman got his first professional break — and worked on Quality's Plastic Man, Timely's Whizzer, and DC's Flash. Funland catches him at the exact moment his studio was winding down, doing cartoon work under his own name and his own editorial control.

The issue is worth attention today on three counts. It is a rare, fully documented example of single-author Golden Age production: Ferstadt as writer, artist, and editor in one book is unusual for a period defined by anonymous shop labour. It preserves the work of Sophie Freedman, one of the era's largely uncatalogued women contributors. And it has an unexpectedly tangled afterlife — unsold copies were stripped of their covers, reissued in Canada as Skunky by Superior/Century Publications, and overprinted with UK prices for distribution by Streamlined of London, making a forgettable American one-shot into a small case study in how postwar comics remainders crossed borders.