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COMIC BOOK STORY: Beaky Buzzard (LTMM 34)
🕑 Added 2021-04-28 15:00:22 +0000 UTCA few months after his first screen appearance in Bob Clampett's Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (1942), the dopey buzzard— patterned after Edgar Bergen's Mortimer Snerd— was christened Beaky Buzzard in a series of featured stories in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics. Soon after, he is mentioned by name in Clampett's The Bashful Buzzard (1945). His headliner stories ended in 1945, but Beaky continued appearing in other stories with the Warners characters.
Presumably due to the merchandising of the character in print media and figurines, the studio was ordered to produce two Beaky cartoons - Friz Freleng's The Lion's Busy and Bob McKimson's Strife with Father (both 1950) were in production simultaneously. Later, in the mid-1950s, Beaky was featured in a series of one-page text stories, often featured alongside Daffy Duck.
In this comic book story, Beaky's sweet tooth gets him into a nickel's worth of trouble. From Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies Comics #34 (September 1944) - drawn and inked by Vive Risto, Beaky's regular artist during the 1940s, and a former animator in Clampett's black-and-white unit.
