Frostbite Fridays - Vacational Therapy!

When IDW saw fit to reprint the Bullwinkle and Rocky comics from Dell and Gold Key, they opted to reprint the comics titled Bullwinkle and Rocky from Gold Key. But these issues are chock full of reprints from earlier versions of the book with titles such as Rocky and Friends, Bullwinkle, and Rocky and his Fiendish Friends. Some of the books appeared in the Dell Four Color series. Tracking down all the original occurrences of these stories is possible I guess using the Grand Comics Database but is made much more difficult because for whatever reason these IDW reprints have not been catalogued as yet for some reason. 

Which goes to suggest that Rocky and Bullwinkle is primarily an animation event and not so much a comic book success. The cover above is from an early Dell Four Color issue and you can tell it's early because it features Mr. Peabody. For whatever reason Mr. Peabody gets short shrift in these comics with Dudley Do-Right getting most of the attention. 

In fact Dudley is a co-star on all the subsequent covers in this volume which were produced (as far as I can tell) for these comics specifically. The typical Gold Key humor comic showcases a zany scene, not at all necessarily related to the material inside. The reference to surfing in the cover above does give the cover a feeling of timeliness that most lack, making them ripe for reprinting through the years. 

The artists for these later issues are not identified. Al Kilgore is credited with most of the work for the earliest stories and there is nothing at GCD to much contradict this. But IDW offers up the idea that the artists Fred Fredericks, Jerry Robinson, and Mel Crawford worked on these early efforts. Jack Mendelsohn and Dave Berg are mentioned as writers thought no specific attributions are made. For the record Roger Landridge did the cover for this tome as well as the cover for last week's volume. 

On a storytelling note, in these tales featuring the sundry characters of the TV shows, there is some effort or assumption made that Pottsylvania the imaginary "Commie" country from which Boris and Natasha come from is a place in other contexts. One Fractured Fairytale takes place there and in one instance Dudley Do-Right chases Snidely Whiplash when he goes there for sanctuary. This note of continuity between the features (not something the cartoons did) makes one imagine some sort of oddball comic event in which the denizens of this "Wardiverse" begin to stumble into our world. 

More next week. 

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