Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics #21
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeLooney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics #21 is part of the foundational Dell run that first brought Warner Bros.' celebrated cartoon roster — Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and supporting characters like Sniffles — into comic book form, making it one of the earliest sustained anthology vehicles for those characters in any print medium. Published in July 1943, it sits squarely in the wartime Golden Age of the series, when Dell's anthology format was still establishing the visual and narrative language for characters audiences primarily knew from animated shorts. The broader series is historically notable for documenting the gradual visual evolution of these characters across issues, offering a comparative record unavailable anywhere else in print. As a mid-run issue from the title's busiest early phase, #21 represents the Dell–Western Publishing collaboration that would eventually make Dell the largest comic book publisher in America by the late 1940s.
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The series was produced under the licensing arrangement Dell struck with Western Printing and Lithographing Co., which held the rights to the Warner Bros. characters; Western handled editorial and art production while Dell published and distributed. Early issues drew on a rotating pool of studio-adjacent artists — including Walt Kelly, Roger Armstrong, Chase Craig, and George Storm — who worked from model sheets tied to the Warner animation unit. By issue #21 (July 1943), the series had settled into a reliable monthly anthology rhythm, running 68 full-color pages at a ten-cent cover price, though writer and artist credits for this specific issue were not individually catalogued in any source consulted.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published July 1943 by Dell Publishing Co. as part of the ongoing Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics series (1941–1955), issue #21 in the original numbering.
- Ran 68 full-color pages — a generous page count reflecting the anthology format standard for the series during its early wartime years.
- The series as a whole is the first sustained comic book vehicle for characters including Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and Sniffles, whose comic-book first appearances occurred in the title's inaugural issues beginning in 1941.
- Produced through the Dell–Western Printing and Lithographing Co. collaboration, with art and editorial handled by Western's team of studio-adjacent cartoonists; individual story credits for #21 are not documented in publicly available indexes.
- Henery Hawk — the pint-sized chicken hawk created by Chuck Jones who debuted in the 1942 short 'The Squawkin' Hawk' — was appearing in the Dell/Western comic pages during this general period, with recurring stories pairing him with a companion character named Ollie Owl rather than Foghorn Leghorn (who had not yet been created).
- The series ran for 165 issues under the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies title before being renamed simply Looney Tunes in 1955, continuing for another 81 issues, for a total Dell run of 246 issues ending in 1962.
- Dell and its successor Gold Key never submitted to the Comics Code Authority, meaning none of their Looney Tunes books — including #21 — were ever technically 'pre-Code' comics in the regulatory sense, a distinction unique among major American publishers of the era.
- No specific story titles, individual page-level credits, or confirmed character first-appearances unique to issue #21 were indexed in any publicly accessible database consulted during research.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Bugs Bunny and Friends #[nn] (1998)
Key issues in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics
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