BORIS & NATASHA

In 1959, a children's cartoon show about a squirrel and a moose became a big hit on television. The show would have several names during its life but its most common one is The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. It was created by Jay Ward whose eponymously named company produced it. It would run with new episodes from November 1959 to June 1964 and then last to this day as reruns in syndication.

While Rocket J. ("Rocky") Squirrel, a short little grey squirrel who perpetually wears a set of blue goggles set atop his head, and his best friend Bullwinkle J. Moose, an often dim-witted but always lovable brown moose with orange antlers, were never spies or operatives or anything that might qualify them for membership in this collection, they were invariably doing something that either sparked the interest of Boris & Natasha or stood in the way of the nefarious duo.

The five seasons of episodes consisted of several story arcs. Some of these arcs were rather lengthy while a few were quite short. Each broadcast had two segments in these arcs, as well as other storylines for other characters.

Wikipedia has a terrific breakdown of the history of the show.

In 2017, Dreamworks Animation Television decided to acquire the rights to produce new adventures for Internet streaming. It ran in two sets of segments of Season 6, with three story arcs released in 2018 and the other three in 2019.

A year after the Rocky and Bullwinkle show was first aired on television, Dell Publications came out with a series of comic book adventures of the two characters as well as their constant nemeses, Boris and Natasha. These were in the Dell Four Color imprint which contained a lot of different stars in its pages over the years. No one storyline dominated the comic from issue to issue as variety seemed the intent.

Dell put out 7 issues of Four Color devoted to the pair though sometimes Rocky got top billing and other times Bullwinkle did. There were also two stand-alone issues of stories.

Gold Key would try its hand at stories, coming out in 1963 with two issues. Charlton Comics would take over after a seven year hiatus with 7 issues where Bullwinkle had top billing, lasting two years. Gold Key would return to the title in 1972 and go until 1979 with a mixture of new stories and repeats of its own and of Dell's.

In the Fall of 1987, Marvel Comics' Star Comics label would bring Moose and Squirrel back for new stories for a couple of years. then we leap ahead to 2014 when IDW tried its hand at adventures in 4 issues.

American Mythology Productions gave us 3 issues of stories in 2017.

In the 90+ adventures in comicbook format that Dell and Gold Key produced in the early 60s and then concluded in the early 70s, many were by the hand of the extremely talented Al Kilgore. Comics.org, an industry expert, credits all of them to Kilgore but at least one websites contests Kilgore's having done them all.

Kilgore had a terrific gift of giving the audience, which ran ostentiably to children but plainly had a lot of adult followers as well. He never talked down to the kids and he gave enough unoffending but still satirical bite to the stories that grown-ups could get a lot out of them.

I do not know who approached whom but in July, 1962, Bell-McClure Syndicate brought out a daily (Mon-Sat) strip entitled Bullwinkle. It was drawn and written by Kilgore during its run of 3 years, 900+ strips. These adventures were extremely topical as well as being timeless in that the adventures could happen most any time but there were numerous instances of name-dropping to mark their place in history. Most notably were the frequent references to JFK prior to his assassination.

NOTE: I have finally accumulated all the strips and am slowly piecing together the story arcs.