Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies #135

History

The Dell Looney Tunes comics were produced in practice by Western Publishing, which held the Warner Bros. cartoon license and handled all editorial and production work, while Dell financed and distributed the books — an arrangement the two companies had maintained since 1938. The series ran uninterrupted from 1941 through 1962 for a total of 246 consecutively numbered issues, after which Western continued publishing the characters under its own Gold Key Comics imprint. Like nearly all Dell/Western licensed titles of this era, issue #135 carries no individual writer or artist credits in its indicia or stories, a standard house policy of Western Publishing at the time; all story and art credits for this specific issue remain unknown.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published January 1953 by Dell Comics; part of the long-running 'Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies' (Dell) series, which ran 246 consecutive issues from 1941 to 1962.
• Issue runs 52 pages in full color and features untitled comic stories spotlighting Bugs Bunny, Mary Jane and Sniffles, Henery Hawk, Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck, Tweety and Sylvester, and Porky Pig in the titled story 'Losers Weepers.'
• Also includes a one-page Bugs Bunny gag strip and a two-page prose text feature titled 'An Exciting Christmas,' consistent with Dell's practice of mixing comic strips with short text pieces to qualify for lower postal rates.
• Features Little Pancho Vanilla as a backup strip character — a revival of the one-shot 1938 Frank Tashlin-directed Merrie Melodies cartoon; the character was resurrected as a recurring comic-book feature beginning with issue #130 (August 1952) and ran through issue #154 (August 1954).
• All story and art credits for this issue are unattributed, consistent with Western Publishing's house policy of not crediting individual creators on licensed Dell titles of this period.
• Issue #135 falls within the title's second masthead phase, 'Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies' (without 'Comics'), which covered issues #108 through #153 before the title name shifted again.
• The Dell/Western publishing partnership that produced this issue — in which Western created the content and Dell distributed it — would continue until 1962, an event comics historians have called 'The Divorce,' after which Western published the same characters under the Gold Key imprint.
• The broader series to which this issue belongs was significant for documenting the visual evolution of the Warner Bros. cartoon characters across two decades of print comics storytelling.

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