This charming Silver Age superteam achieved minor notoriety because, unlike other stories about superpets, the SCPA stories were unabashedly funny animal stories, with fully anthropomorphic but pun-and-wordplay-filled animal civilizations in which dogs paid for things with coins that looked like bones and cats paid for things with coins that looked like fish. These stories starred Krypto and thereby connected their funny animal reality to the more serious-minded reality of the superhero titles Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes.
When comic book fans began to demand rigid seriousness in their titles during the Bronze Age and later, the Space Canine Patrol Agency was not only discarded but retconned out of existence.
The team made its next major appearance during a nostalgic Animal Man storyline by Grant Morrison in which Animal Man visits the realm of forgotten superhero comic characters and finds the SCPA reduced to bloody fights among themselves for food scraps.
During the recent reconstruction era of comic books, the SCPA has made a return in both the animated TV series Krypto and in overtly non-canonical DC tales. Its willingness to engage in a unapologetic and unself-conscious whimsy instead of mire itself in the occasionally pretentious seriousness of most early 21st century comic book titles has given it a place in the hearts of many comic book fans and superhero fans.
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