Summary: <br> Watch as we pull a podcast out of our hat—and look at some classic Rocky and Bullwinkle comics.<br> Affiliate link included.<br> Transcript below:<br> <br> Now it’s time for something really different. I’ll be taking a look at Rocky and Bullwinkle Classic Adventures from IDW straight ahead.<br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.<br> In the 1950s and ’60s, almost any media property could be a comic book, whether it’s Have Gun with Travels, Star Trek, I Spy, And today’s entry Rocky and Bullwinkle. Sometimes the transition to the comic book medium could be very rough. Oftentimes it didn’t feel like the original story – it was missing a certain something. I remember reading some gold key Looney Tunes comics several years back and they just didn’t feel all like Looney Tunes: they weren’t funny, they seemed to miss the whole point of Looney Tunes. If you read the early gold key Star Trek comics and even some of the later ones, it doesn’t feel at all like the show. They used words that don’t quite seem like Star Trek, and it feels like the people who wrote and drew it just kind of had seen some pictures and decided to make up a story. That, thankfully, is not the case with these classic Rocky and Bullwinkle comics that were reprinted by IDW. <br> The book collects issues One through Twelve of the Gold Key Series of Rocky and Bullwinkle stories. They managed to capture the tone of the series perfectly. Each issue contained four stories, just kind of like the TV show often had for segments. Each has two Rocky and Bullwinkle segments, and in the middle you have Sherman and Peabody, and either Dudley Doright or Fractured Fairytales. <br> The only thing really missing from the equation is the use of serialized stories on the TV show. You can’t really have that. These comics actually were published between 1962 and 1976, so you couldn’t really carry on a multi-part story. It does seem like a curious model by Gold Key, and they did a lot of big gaps on the books they sold; but I think they were less intended to be ongoing serial stories and things that you read every month. I suppose they were, I think more something that you had in stores that you could buy and give to fans of a series or which might catch the eye of a fan. As such, the closest we have to a long-form story is one where the first and second Rocky and Bullwinkle segments tied together in a story that ties into the Moon Man.<br> To go over the plots of all these comics would seem to be kind of redundant. Rocky and Bullwinkle was never really about the plots, even when they were traveling along ways on an adventure they were just traveling so they could get from one gag to the next gag. What’s important is the tone and the humor and they do a great job capturing that, and there are some hilarious stories in there. My favorite is probably the one where Bullwinkle accidentally buys a laundromat and this ends up leading Boris into thinking that Bullwinkle is secretly a Pottsylvanian spy. Or the story where Snidely Whiplash is hypnotizing Dudley Do Right to do his bidding and commit robberies in his sleep, and Dudley is going around with a picture of the suspect drawing based on witness accounts and is showing it to people, saying, “If you see this man, report him” – no clue that it’s actually him. So these are the type of stories that they really would use on the TV show.<br> The criticisms or, I guess, questions…one thing that came up when I was reading this is they had a couple of stories where they had Dudley dealing with modern things: he went on TV in one episode and another he went up in a modern aviation program, and it seems like maybe the writers forgot that Dudley Do Right was supposed to be a period piece set around th...
