Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Pomes. Bullwinkle and Kerouac.

Now and again I'll buy an old comic book for no good reason. I guess I bought this one because I loved the Bullwinkle cartoons when I was a kid. And I love the Bullwinkle cartoons now. Jay Ward was one of the most talented animators to work in the days of what we call "limited animation". This was when it was just way too expensive to produce cartoons with old full animation. It's a very labor intensive product to have animators drawing and inking and coloring so many cels per minute of cartoon. So animators had to make do with less. What the best of them lacked in fluid animation they made up for by telling good yarns and drawing exceptionally funny characters.

Enter Jay Ward. His cartoons are funny to everyone. Kids laugh at them. Grownups laugh at them. He was exceptional at slipping in-jokes past the censors. Among the creations of his studio were, of course, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Crusader Rabbit, Dudley Do Right, George of the Jungle, Tom Slick, Super Chicken, and (my favorite) Roger Ramjet.

I picked up this comic on a whim. I'd never seen one--or had seen it so long ago that I'd forgotten about it. Mainly, I was curious if the writing was going to be similar to that of the cartoon. There must have been some input from Jay Ward Productions, because the stories are indeed quite funny. The kind of thing I'd expect to have seen and heard in a Jay Ward cartoon.

It's in pretty good condition, and I'm glad I picked it up. I only paid a few dollars for it. Into the collection it goes.


Even the back covers of many Dell Comic books had simple stories on them.


2 comments:

Henry R. Kujawa said...

The one BULLWINKLE comic I had as a kid was where he supposedly inherited an old (haunted!) mansion in Mooslevania. The main story was serialized throughout the comic, interspersed with other stories, just like on the TV show. As a kid, it took me "forever" to read all the way thru the thing! So of course, I loved it. It wasn't just a comic-- it was like an "event".

James Robert Smith said...

I wonder which issue that was. Could it have been one of the giant-size comics?