In Search of an Elusive Good Rabbit Artist

When it comes to sharing age-old comics that only registers in the memory of old-school comic readers, there's the borderline legal impetus to share that joy by posting scans of some notable short stories, like The Horrors of it All,  Four Color Shadows, Big Blog Comics, Pappy's Golden Age, and recently, the defunct Looney Comics of Matthew Hunter who started his blog to share some Looney Tunes comics with his opinions on them.

For the most part, most of the Warner Bros. Comics had sub-par art and stiff off-model characters.  But there was one exception.  In the few Looney Tunes comics that happened to fall in my hands, there was always one story that seemed to be slightly above average than the others.

For some reason, Elmer's line of "That's my Gwandfather you're punching!"
is endearably funny to me.

A long time ago (circa 2016), Mike Sterling made the claim that there never was a “Good Rabbit Artist” and the reason Carl Barks comics was fondly remembered while Warner Bros. Comics weren’t.  For the longest time, this confused me, since I thought this was the elusive artist that'd fit the profile.

It's unusual for Bugs to build up to trickery, rather than just bulldoze his way
into forcing others into whatever reality he deems plausible.

Nowadays, we'd recognize Bugs' tactics as gaslighting,
but at the time, I thought it was typical trickster tactics.

I started doing some research, but absent a name, I had no way of identifying him.  By process of elimination, I knew he wasn't Ed Volke, Pete Alvarado, Chase Craig, Roger Armstrong, Tom McKimson or Charles McKimson [no relation?].

It was only by going through the Comics Database that I found this elusive clean line artstyle showcasing Bugs Bunny with highly defined buck teeth than usual was most likely Phil de Lara, who also did the Porky Pig and Daffy Duck comics in the same issues.  The Bugs Bunny comics were also 10 pages long, which gave rise to the allusion that these were higher quality material, especially since the shorter comics weren’t as strong.

He was quite the prolific artist, working in animation, for both Warner Bros. and Walt Disney, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Chip & Dale and Woody Woodpecker.

My enthusiasm upon finding these comics was dampened upon actually seeing them all at once.  One factor that comes up is that the Warner Bros. Comics bear little resemblance to the cartoons that inspired them.  The majority of the Bugs Bunny comics had Bugs be on a frenemy terms with Elmer, and there were plots involving cursed idols, running across crooks, and casual racism which would make reprinting such stories a problem.

As with any adaptation of licensed products, there was a tendency to misunderstand the allure of the characters, grafting known marketable traits onto new properties that were known to work.  Somewhat similar to the Weekday episodes of The Real Ghostbusters where the team temporarily branched out into Crimebusters, cracking down on criminals.  Not exactly the same as tracking down and analyzing ghosts, which made the team more like cops than anything, which wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing anyways!

The difference between the nameless comics and the Carl Barks classics is that for all of Phil de Lara's skills, he worked off someone else's anonymous script.  If given the chance, could he have used his imagination to create something that could've expanded on the nature of the Warner Bros. cartoons?  We may never know.

There's no animal such as a pip-squeak, but if there were, would it behave any differently from how Elmer portrayed one here?

I normally would’ve ended this post here had I not in my searches come across this otherwise unremarkable story from 1957 where Bugs encounters Elmer on the docks in an inconspicuous disguise and WAITAMINIT.

That steamboat with cargo looks awfully familiar...

In fact, this whole setup is directly lifted off from The Crab with the Golden Claws, which was published in 1947, a full decade later, basically summarizing a 48-page comic classic in under 10 pages.

For any American ignorant of Tintin, this would be another unremarkable story, but for any comic connoisseurs in the know, this would be deliberate plagiarism, or at the very least, an indirect homage.

One other fault with these Warner Bros. comics is that the ending can be abrupt and with a somewhat unsatisfying joke, even for a condensed 10-page comic like this one.  As such, it seems we won't be seeing a collection of Phil De Lara's works anytime soon.