Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics #79
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeLooney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics #79 (May 1948) is a representative installment of the most important Warner Bros. animated-character comic series in publishing history — the Dell/Western run that gave Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and the rest of the cast their first sustained presence in print. The series as a whole documented the visual evolution of these characters across more than two decades, making each mid-run issue a snapshot of how the on-model house style was developing alongside the theatrical shorts. Arriving in the same year that Marvin the Martian debuted on screen, this issue sits at a creatively fertile moment for the franchise, when the core cast was fully established and the anthology format — multiple short comic strips per issue — was at its most polished. While #79 is not itself a milestone first-appearance issue, it represents the steady, high-circulation monthly engine that normalized Warner Bros. cartoon characters as comic-book stars during the Golden Age.
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The series was produced under the long-running Dell/Western Publishing partnership, in which Dell financed and distributed while Western Publishing handled all editorial content, writing, art, and printing. Chase Craig — who had personally written and drawn the earliest issues of the series beginning in 1941 — was the guiding editorial force at Western's Los Angeles office, and Roger Armstrong was among the principal artists on recurring features like Porky Pig and the 'Sniffles and Mary Jane' strip. By 1948, Carl Buettner had raised the artistic bar for the Warner Bros. titles, and a stable pool of Western Publishing talent — including Ken Hultgren, Jack Bradbury, and others — kept the monthly anthology running at a professional clip. The series operated on an anonymous-creator model typical of the era, so specific credits for individual stories in #79 are not publicly indexed.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published May 1948 by Dell Publishing Co., produced by Western Publishing and Lithography under their formalized creative partnership.
- Issue #79 in a consecutively numbered run that began in 1941 and eventually reached 246 total issues across two title variants before concluding in 1962.
- Cover price was ten cents; the issue ran 52 pages in full color, staple-bound — the standard format for the series throughout the late 1940s.
- The series was the first and primary comic book home for Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd in print — characters whose theatrical short films were simultaneously the most popular animated shorts in U.S. movie theaters.
- Chase Craig (writer-artist and later editor) and Roger Armstrong (artist) were the foundational creative voices behind the series from its debut, with Armstrong continuing to contribute Porky Pig and Sniffles/Mary Jane stories into this era.
- Key Collector Comics does not designate issue #79 as a key issue; the series' recognized key issues within this run are concentrated in the earliest numbers (first appearances) and issue #91 (1949), which carries a disputed early-appearance notation for a coyote character.
- The series title was 'Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics' for issues #1–107, then underwent minor title adjustments, before being shortened to simply 'Looney Tunes' at issue #166 (1955).
- Dell notably refused membership in the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers in 1948 — the same year this issue was published — signaling the publisher's confidence in its family-friendly licensed-character model as distinct from the horror and crime genres drawing public scrutiny.
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Key issues in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics
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