Al Kilgore (1927-1983) was a great cartoonist who is well known to fans of vintage movies for his caricatures of stars, and for his co-founding of the Laurel & Hardy appreciation society, The Sons of the Desert. He also drew the Rocky & Bullwinkle newspaper strip that ran from 1962 to 1965 in not-nearly-enough newspapers. Most fans of Moose and Squirrel agree that it did a superb job of capturing the spirit and humor of the TV cartoons. It has been hard however to locate samples of this strip…
…until now. Someone — I know not who — has assembled what appears to be a complete collection of the daily strip (there was never a Sunday page) and has published them in two paperback volumes which are now available for purchase on Amazon.
Some of the strips in the book have been printed off scans of original art, probably mostly scans that Heritage Auctions did recently when they sold a whole lotta Kilgore art. Some have been printed from newspapers and in some cases, they have been restored adequately with touch-ups. The fellow (I'm assuming it's a fellow) who put the books together made a font of Kilgore's distinctive lettering in order to reletter strips where the lettering was in need of repair. He also wrote a personal essay about the strip and his love for it.
In fact, he put in everything but his name. There's a copyright notice but it doesn't say who is claiming that copyright…which makes one wonder how legitimate this whole enterprise is. I might not have been so quick to order these volumes if I'd known this…and I should also say that I think the books are way overpriced for what you get. So I'm not telling you to buy them, just that they're there and that the strip was wonderful. Because I feel a little weird about these books, I've configured the following Amazon links so I don't get a cut if you order Volume 1 or Volume 2 through this site.
While we're on the subject of Al Kilgore, I want to clear up something that probably bugs me more than it should. A number of Rocky & Bullwinkle comic books were published in the sixties by Western Publishing Company, appearing at first under the Dell logo and later under the Gold Key colophon. (If you don't understand what happened there, read this.)
None of this work was signed or credited and a lot of folks — including some selling the old comics or the art from them — are crediting it to Al Kilgore when, in fact, he did very little of it. Take a look at this little graphic I assembled. The drawing of Bullwinkle on the right was inarguably drawn and inked by Al Kilgore…
The other four drawings were lifted from issues of Dell and Gold Key comics which some credit to Kilgore. Just look at Bullwinkle's head shape and the design of his antlers. Does anyone think those were drawn by the same person? This is, as Alex Jones would put it, my Perry Mason Moment.
Kilgore drew some promotional comics of Jay Ward characters (including our old pals Quisp and Quake) that came with cereal or were for other purposes. But for the Dell and Gold Key comic books, I only see Kilgore in the first issue of Rocky and His Fiendish Friends (October, 1962) — a comic I remember very fondly from my childhood. It may or may not have been the first comic Western put out with the Gold Key logo, but it was the first I saw on a rack of the new comics…and of course, avidly purchased.
It has an inside front cover by Kilgore and then there's a Rocky & Bullwinkle story serialized throughout the issue that I'm fairly sure he penciled but did not ink. He did not draw the other stories in that issue or the ones that followed and I doubt he did any covers.
And there's no evidence that he did or didn't write anything in these comics. Alter Ego magazine recently ran an interview with one of the editors at Western in those days and he got all sorts of things wrong and on this topic, he said Kilgore wrote and drew most of those books. As you can see above, he definitely did not draw most or even much. The editor also said Kilgore did their Hoppity Hooper comic book. I guess it's possible Kilgore wrote and/or drew one that wound up on a shelf somewhere but Western never published a Hoppity Hooper comic book.
Some have speculated that those Dell and Gold Key comics were done by others who worked for Jay Ward then. I sure doubt it. A few of the writers who worked for Jay Ward did work for Western Publishing, especially Lloyd Turner and (briefly) Bill Scott but both did all their work for Western's Los Angeles office which had nothing to do with the the comics in question. They were done out of Western's office in New York City, far from the Jay Ward Studios.
I believe all the comics we're talking about here were done by East Coast talent. Al Kilgore lived and worked in New York as did Mel Crawford, who drew some covers and maybe some insides. So did Fred Fredericks, who was best known for drawing the Mandrake the Magician newspaper strip. Also, Dave Berg (yes, the guy from MAD) said he wrote a few stories but I don't know which ones. The only crossover would be Jack Mendelsohn, who lived in New York and worked for Western on all sorts of comics, including Rocky and His Fiendish Friends and Bullwinkle, before moving out to L.A. He worked for Ward on the George of the Jungle show and then for a lot of other TV producers.
For years now, folks who don't know who drew certain Disney, Warner Brothers or other funny animal comics from Western have just automatically credited the art to Pete Alvarado. Occasionally, they're right because Pete was very prolific but there were more than forty other guys drawing those comics. And once in a rare while, art for a Rocky & Bullwinkle comic credited to Al Kilgore was actually drawn by Al Kilgore. But that happened rarely, not most of the time as too many people insist.