Bongo and Lumpjaw???Hey, come on now, my grandparents never seemed to realize that I was into..."older"...comics, so they were always giving me piles of kiddie comics like this. What, I should throw it out??
Anyway, Bongo was half of two animated shorts Disney released together as the feature Fun And Fancy Free (the one with Mickey And The Beanstalk).
The cartoon was based on a Sinclair Lewis story (really!). Bongo was a trained circus bear who wanted to live in the wild, but when he escaped and got there, he learned it was a lot tougher than it had seemed in his dreams. Lumpjaw was a nasty dickweed of a wild bear who didn't dig Bongo hitting on his chick. Bongo, his unicycle, and his circus trickery helped him prevail over the Biff Tannen of the forest.
So why the hell not put their continuing story in comics? Huh??
This was Gold Key's Walt Disney Showcase #3 (1971), which consisted entirely of reprints from Dell's Four Color #706 (1956) and #886 (1958). ("Four Color" was basically an umbrella title for all the adaptations they published in this era, and they put out anywhere from 3 to 13 issues per month, which explains the big jump in issue numbers in only two years. The series lasted until #1354, so eat that, Action Comics!!).
The art was by Frank McSavage, a name so great he really should have been drawing Sgt. Fury or something.
In the lead story, Bongo knocks out Lumpjaw, paints yellow stripes on him, convinces him that he's eaten so much honey that he's turned into a bumblebee, and sends him off to collect pollen from the flowers so the bees can take a vacation.
Man, I really do have too many comics, don't I?
I own so much junk, including comics and other media, I created a whole separate blog just to decide whether or not to keep any of it. (Also to make me clean. Need an article, must clean!)
ReplyDeleteMy mind works weird, but occasionally I make it work for me.