A Looney Tune

Walt Kelly certainly paid his dues as a comic book man, creating stories for the middle of many a book, early in his career.

For instance, he created half a dozen stories of Pat, Patsy and Pete for some early Looney Tunes Comics—obscure material and fairly rare to come by. But our blog compatriot OtherEric DID come by one and generously shares his scans with us here.

Kelly's style is quite recognizable, even early on, with his kids cute as ever. His bear bears a resemblance to Carl Bark's bears from this period, but how many different ways can you draw cartoon bears anyway?

It's all part of the Whirled of Kelly, from Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies #24, October 1943:

Hare-Brain

This storyline seems to wander all over the swamp.

Pooed Out

"Scurrilous lagamuffins, poltroons, spalpeens"—woosh, lotta name-callin' goin' on here.

Even if it is a case of mistaken identity, sorta grisly thinking them boys are eating bun's two heads.

Giant Red Ants

Even though this is a site dedicated to Walt Kelly, it still seems to make sense to show the Al Hubbard story art for The Adventures of Peter Wheat, since it's a continuation of Kelly's creation. Here we have issue #54, as always thanks to OtherEric of the Digital Comic Museum and his dedication to track down every possible issue of these rare comics to share with the world.

An introduction from OtherEric:

Here's a Connell/Hubbard issue of Adventures of Peter Wheat, #54 from 1955. While this team created fewer issues than Kelly, they actually worked on the book quite a bit longer than Kelly did—it just came out less frequently and on an irregular schedule that I still haven't quite figured out yet. The situation is not helped by the fact that the information line with the issue number and year is frequently blurry or unclear. I've hit several issues that were incorrectly labeled by the sellers and have at least one or two where I'm still only 90% sure I've correctly identified the issue even when it's in my hands.

This is a fairly typical issue by the team, and with one exception Thom and I will get to soon, it seems like they never did continued storylines. One thing I do like is that they only rarely use the Wizard and the Hornet Knights as the enemy—creating an interesting variety of new foes and challenges for Peter & crew to face. Kelly got away with using Dragonel and the Wizard as much as he did because he was constantly letting all the characters, heroes and villains alike, evolve and change. Connell & Hubbard seem to not have had that freedom, and take the series in a slightly different direction. This does allow them to occasionally pull out the Wizard to good effect when he does show up.

Chasin' the Bun-Nappers

We're skipping past two Sundays now, cuz those two had nuttin to do with this storyline. But if ya gotta see em, I already posted em some time ago. They had somethin to do with Easter eggs that hatched into googley birds, or somethin like that.

Anyway, happy Sunday, Kelly Sunday!

ARNK

The horse keep on runnin' A-way, and Grundoon keep on sleepin'.

You folk out there keep on readin'?

My Dear Sir!

Happy Sunday, Kelly Sunday!

Blood! GACK!

Kelly's Pogo strip is jes' fine when 'nothin' is happening. But it's jes' finer when 'somethin' is happening. I love it when the strip has a storybook feeling.

And of course there's a deja vu thing here, cuz Albert went all googley-woogley some years before over the same Cock Robin lines in The Pogo Peek-a-Book.