Sunday With Bugs Bunny

Al Stoffell and Ralph Heimdahl

The MEN BEHIND THE COMICS

In my childhood I used to follow the daily comic strip adventures of Bugs Bunny in my hometown newspaper the Trail (BC) Daily Times. Finding information about Al Stoffell (writer) and Ralph Heimdahl (cartoonist) has always been a near futile chore, perhaps they were unjustly ignored because they were producing a cartoon “property” rather than illuminating original characters. I did, however, find a short article that shed some light on their lives. In the creators’  own words:

Al Stoffell – “Away back thar in 1947, after I had been a freelance writer, hotel publicity man, newpaper reporter and a lieutenant in the Navy, I turned up as a handy man in the editorial department of Western Publishing Co., which had an agreement with Warner Brothers and Newspaper Enterprise Association to produce a Bugs Bunny Sunday page. One day somebody gave me a pat on the back and told me I was going to write the Bugs Bunny Sunday page. My Norwegian friend (Ralph Heimdahl) and I have been at it ever since.”

Ralph Heimdahl – “I had been teaching for seven years in Minnesota, six years in a school for the deaf, when I read about a national competition that Walt Disney was holding to find artists to work for him in California. I drew up some Mickey Mouses and some Donald Ducks and sent them in. I was accepted along with eleven other guys in 1937 and we went through the Disney training.

There was a big strike and I wound up on a farm in Vermont. While on the farm I created a comic strip called Minnie Sue and Little Haha which I finally sold to an outfit in New York after my return to California. It wasn’t real successful but it was a nice little Indian story.”

[1] November 22, 1958

[2] September 1, 1959

[3] May 14, 1960

The Men Behind The Comics: Heimdahl, Stoffell: 

Batty About Bugs, R. Terrance Roskin, 

Desert Sun, July 12 1976

HERE

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