The Inspector

The Inspector is a bumbling French police detective from the Pink Panther animated franchise, perpetually outwitted and humiliated by the Pink Panther himself despite his best efforts to maintain authority and solve cases.

Few animated-comics partnerships feel as perfectly matched as The Inspector and his perpetual tormentor, the Pink Panther — and when Carl Fallberg and Phil De Lara launched this hapless lawman into comics with The Pink Panther #1 in 1971, they brought one of animation's great straight-men squarely into the Bronze Age funny-book tradition. Published under the Western label, The Inspector has kept gloriously chaotic company over the decades, sharing pages with the likes of Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker, and Uncle Scrooge — a murderers' row of classic cartoon comedy. What's remarkable is the quiet endurance here: a presence stretching from 1971 all the way to 2016 speaks to a character with genuine staying power across generations of readers. If you love the golden era of Western Publishing's licensed cartoon comics, The Inspector is exactly the kind of underdog worth tracking down.