Okay, this may be merely a Felix the Cat cartoon, but it also may be one of the worst illustrations of misrepresentations in comic history. This cartoon with Felix the Cat and the Abominable Snowman is from 1958.

How many misstatements and mistakes do you see in it? (No, I’m not really upset. I’m just playing along with some kind of mock insult to our cryptozoological legacy.)

Some of the errors I caught are:

- Abominable Snowmen at the North Pole (the Arctic) – They actually are reported to live in the montane valleys of the Himalaya and cross the snowfields, allegedly, when visiting other cartoon characters in neighboring valleys.

- Chinese-appearing Inuit (“Eskimo”) living in igloos at the North Pole (a bit of the old tyme racism, humm) – Wrong, wrong, wrong.

- Four-toed humanlike footprints left as Yeti tracks – Incorrect, they are usually five-toed and more anthropoid.

- Left and right footprints being made with a right-footed fake. Ooops.

- White, snowy and/or icy appearance of the Abominable Snowmen (“fake” and “real”). Yeti are actually reported to be reddish brown to black, except in wrong-headed and hastily written media rehashings.

- Height of Abominable Snowmen. How tall do you think that huge “real” one is in this cartoon? Twenty-two feet high? Did someone say “True Giant”?

- That map of North America, with Alaska located above Canada, as an ice sheet, and being the same as the “North Pole.” Cartoon artists are not geographers. Please check your maps, captain.

I’m amazed that those of us growing up in the late 1950s and the early 1960s didn’t completely flunk out of school if we took some of these cartoons as facts turned into comics. Yikes.

Thanks to Henry for bringing this to my attention today.