“Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.”
It must be pretty hard to take a classic property and bring it to the present with the same zing that made it popular years ago. Publishers continue to try over and over again and usually the effort misses the mark–the original voice is hard to mimic, and the heart of the characterization is never grasped just right. The exceptions can be found in places like Dynamite Comics’ pulp masked hero monthlies. Now IDW Publishing has managed to bring the humor and look that we remember so well from the mind of Jay Ward in the 1960s and 1970s back to us as if it never left with its new Rocky & Bullwinkle series.
Like the original series, which featured the moose named Bullwinkle and his flying squirrel pal Rocky, we get the arch-enemies of Boris and Natasha. Interspersed between stories of Rocky & Bullwinkle we also get that affable Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right and his classic moustached villain, Snidely. Mr. Peabody and Sherman, who played in segments in the original cartoon, now have their own monthly at IDW, so we don’t know if we’ll see them back here very soon. But in Issue #1 we get plenty of the same humor and art stylings that we enjoyed in the original cartoons with the other characters. The voice of each of Bullwinkle and Rocky are simply dead-on. Even the voice of the narrator, the sign fonts, the environments, and the other characters, all mirror the original show.
If nostalgia is your thing, and you’re after some of that innocent humor kids of all ages will appreciate, look no further than the new Rocky & Bullwinkle. After the break, check out a seven-page preview of Issue #1, courtesy of IDW Publishing:
