As all of you know, I love PUNS! My translated and dialogued Disney comic book scripts are chock full of them!
Here's an unexpected pun that I really liked, from (of all places) Charlton's HANNA-BARBERA PARADE # 7 (Cover Date: May, 1972) and its two-page Huckleberry Hound gag/story!
Not yet... we're just setting up for THE pun!
Still not yet... But, we're on our way...
Almost... Alll...mooo...ssst there... I can feeeeel it coming... Just one more...
Ready? Here we go...
YESSSS!
Aw, c'mon... Tell me that WASN'T worth the buildup!
Oh, it wasn't? All right, then... Better punning next time... I hope!
BONUS BLUE-DOG TIME TRAVEL MOMENT... or "BONUS HUCK-ING AROUND WITH TIME"!
Here's how CHARLTON did it (above)... Not so bad by Charlton standards, considering they previously produced THIS! (Art by Frank Johnson - below.)
And here's how the great Harvey Eisenberg did it a decade earlier for Dell/Gold Key...
I'll give Charlton's Ray Dirgo some points for effort (...and fine Frank Johnson $100.00 for lack of same)...
...But nobody beats Harvey Eisenberg with these characters!
BONUS HUCK KNIGHT-PUN...
Long before we had THIS...
We had THIS... Courtesy of the great cartoon writer Warren Foster!
And this version could "knight" all "day" long!
With that, I'll simply say... Good... Knight!
4 comments:
What's this we hear about "Blue-Dog Time Travel"? Could it be that the moment if triumph has come for our noble society - the Brigade of the Time-Bending Blue Beagles? We, who travel through time in an effort to gather every blue hound we can find to expand the ranks of our organization (blue dogs are hard to come by when taking just one era of hstory into account, after all).
It was we, of course, who tranported the hound known as Huckleberry through time with the hopes of recruting him - but a cog jammed somewhere and he ended up in the distant past! We'll bet he wrote the whole thing off as a dream afterwards, too! Hmph!
Funny… I always thought “Beagles” were more concerned with CRIME than TIME!
And much stranger things than enjoying puns with a knight are “written off as dreams”. Personally, I’m hoping for the whole year of 2020!
The Frank Johnson panel has almost a Mort Walker feel to it, from the lettering to the guy delivering the telegram. He almost looks like Beetle's buck-toothed buddy Zero.
Frank Johnson was out of that King Features Syndicate / Mort Walker (“school” or “house style”), Deb, with Johnson having drawn the King Features strip “Boner’s Ark”. That more than accounts for any similarities which, as you note, are clearly present.
And he was perfectly fine for that strip! It worked very well. But, that did not make him suitable for a character like Huckleberry Hound. Ray Dirgo at least “tried” and, as time passed, he did actually “get better” (a little - with his flaws eventually acquiring some degree of "charm"), but you don’t follow Harvey Eisenberg with Frank Johnson on a character as indelibly-designed as Huckleberry Hound!
This panel was in the first issue of Charlton’s Huckleberry Hound title in August, 1970 – one month after the final Gold Key issue in July! Imagine what THAT must have looked like to a Hanna-Barbera enthusiast like me, even back then!
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