Moose Call

Between 1962 and 1967, a brilliant and under-heralded cartoonist named Al Kilgore wrote and drew a Bullwinkle comic strip for the Bell-McClure Syndicate.  It was faithful to the TV cartoons and pretty darned funny but it never managed to make it into many newspapers.  That may be why it is largely unknown these days…and hard to find.  Strip collectors haven't had much luck.  A couple of publishers who reprint classic newspaper strips made the same search and also came up cold.

However, recently someone — I dunno who — has dumped a ton of original art from the strip on the original art market, as well as proof sheets that presumably came from the same source. I'd love to have a book or two that reprinted it so I thought I'd suggest it here. Maybe if someone does some detective work, that someone can find copies of all the strips or at least enough to issue one volume. The reprint rights should not be difficult.

And while I have your attention, assuming I have your attention, here's a line that's currently on Kilgore's Wikipedia page: "He also drew the Dell, Gold Key, Whitman, and Charlton comic books of Rocky and Bullwinkle and related characters." No, he didn't. There are a few stories in the Dell issues that look like Kilgore may have penciled them. Most of the Dell issues look nothing like his artwork nor does anything done for the books published under other imprints.

Who did draw them? There's some art by Mel Crawford in a few issues but most of it is by artists who have never been identified by historians. In the absence of those names, some folks decide to credit them to Kilgore. In theory, Mr. Kilgore could have written some of those comics but I know of no evidence that he did. Jack Mendelsohn wrote a few of them but most of the writing is unidentified too.

The early comics based on the Jay Ward characters are one of those black holes of comic book history. No one seems to know anything about them. Recently in Alter Ego magazine, one of the editors of those comics was interviewed and he said that Kilgore wrote and drew the Rocky & His Friends comics and also the Hoppity Hooper comic. He was wrong about the Rocky & His Friends books as a simple look at the art proves. Only a fraction of it could be by Kilgore. He was also wrong about the Hoppity Hooper comic books because there never were any Hoppity Hooper comic books. I guess I can't prove that Al Kilgore wouldn't have drawn them if there had been any but I doubt it. He was pretty busy then writing and drawing a great newspaper strip.