As previously established I’ve always had an abiding passion for the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes characters, especially in their original incarnations. Oh, I know that it’s good that they evolved over the years, but I also believe the further they got from their beginnings the weaker they got. I’ve never had the chance to read the a lot of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic books, especially the early ones, but I recently came across a treasure trove of them online. And boy, am I happy.

I find them to be charming and wonderfully “on model” (as they say in the animation industry), so it’s a shame that the Grand Comic Book Database has no idea who wrote or drew any of these stories. They’re also more than a little odd; that’s certainly the case with Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies #8.

There’s a lot of material to cover here and I won’t be covering most of it. Like the Bugs Bunny story with an Arabian Knights theme and toxic African-American stereotypes. I know enough about funny animal comics to know that the Sniffles and Mary Jane stories are generally well thought of, but I frankly wasn’t impressed with this outing. Plus there’s a Kandi the Cave Kid strip by Walt Kelly, but frankly, I wasn’t that crazy about it either.

What did make the cut was an unlikely team-up between two straight men, Porky Pig, and Elmer Fudd who along with Petunia Pig get involved in a fairly straight adventure story It ends with a “continued” blur and them shipwrecked on a desert island

Next up is a story where Elmer actually gets top billing over Bugs in an outing where Elmer is a farmer dissatisfied with his animals output and Bugs a prop in a stage magician’s act looking for a handout. Elmer is clearly demonstrating poor management by cruelly berating his livestock for their poor performance which Bugs sees as an opportunity to seed descent among them. For a moment, I actually expected Bugs to lead them into an Animal Farm style revolt but no, instead he encourages them to seek fame and fortune at the county fair. This, of course, is an unmitigated failure, but all is well in the end thanks to the healing power of an image of FDR.

Next up is an original character that never made it into animated cartoons, RingyRoonga. A roonga being an imaginary African animal created for another strip in a previous issue of Looney Tunes. Here Ringy has been redesigned into a cuter, fully anthropomorphized character, a lost soul who is always being mistaken for a skunk. In this nicely drawn story, he’s teamed with Freddy Fox, a heavy from the short Porky’s Hired Hand.

And finally there’s the feature where the roonga originated, Pat, Patsy and Pete, a strip about two kids and their talking penguin pal. Smith left the feature and went on to do a similar comic, Peter and Pudgie for both Crackajack and Popular Comics