Bugs and Porky meet a Drag King: Warner Brothers Comics

When I was a kid, my favorite comic titles were Harvey (gay-vague Casper the Friendly Ghost), Disney (Donald Duck as macho adventurer), and the Gold Key jungle adventures.  If I had allowance money leftover, Little Lulu and Archie comics were ok.

Comics featuring Warner Brothers cartoon characters Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Bugs Bunny were low on my list.  Not as low as Charleton Comics, but low.

The art was amateurish, with minimal backgrounds, or just blank space.  This is one of the best covers,depicting Bugs opening a door leading to another planet, where a cowboy-rabbit is racing across the desert on a camel.

And instead of the anarchic outsiders of the cartoons, the characters were stable, stolid suburbanites, with houses and jobs and girlfriends. Porky was a single dad, raising his nephew, Cicero, like a Donald Duck knockoff.

But sometimes Bugs teamed up with Porky Pig or Yosemite Sam for adventure stories.  Maybe they stumbled upon a haunted inn.  Or they answered a job ad for "undersea explorers"  Or a telegram arrived about "trouble at the ranch."  Buddy-bonding, captures, and nick-of-time rescues followed.

A continuing series had Bugs and Porky working as Indiana Jones-style adventurer-archaeologists, investigating the myth of Pegasus or discovering a lost civilization hidden under the ice of Antartica.  With no girlfriends in sight, and no damsels in distress to be won.

Unfortunately, you couldn't find the adventure stories by looking at the covers -- almost all of them displayed one-shot gags.  Who could guess that this cover art, featuring Cicero using a pogo stick to steal a lick of Porky's ice cream, hid a story about the guys finding a mysterious artifact that leads them to lost Atlantis?  

And the clerks at the drug store frowned on looking inside.  You had to just buy the issue and take your chances.

More after the break

Or you could pick up a pile of them at a garage sale, friends' older brothers who were "too old for comics," or a bookstore "$1 bin."  That's how I found "The Kingdom of Nowhere" (Porky Pig 4, 1965),  Porky wins a contest to re-name a Medieval kingdom (he suggests Boovaria).  But he must fight the other winner, the Black Knight.

When I first read the story, I didn't realize that this small, short-haired person was grabbing the king's cape, or that it was supposed to be his queen.  I thought he had a tiny boyfriend grabbing his rump.

When Porky and the Black Knight learn that, as an added bonus, the winner will marry the Princess,  they drop out of the contest and run away.  Porky, because he already has a girlfriend.

But why does the Black Knight run away?  Could it be that he doesn't particularly care for girls?

Later we get an explanation: the Black Knight was really his girlfriend Petunia in drag!  Porky exclaims "No wonder you weren't interested in winning the hand of the princess!"

But this quick-fix doesn't detract from the image of a boy not interested in girls.

And it adds a new question: why, precisely, did Petunia disguise herself as a man?

For that matter, why are Bugs and Porky so comfortable in drag?

See also:  "Hollywood Steps Out": Queer Looney Tunes in 1941

Bugs and Daffy: The Gay Warner Brothers

Tiny Toon Adventures: Not what you think

Charlton Comics