Some of the stuff which Dick Huemer did during his career in cartooning is better-known than Scrappy. Fantasia, for instance, and Dumbo. Buck O’Rue, however, is even more obscure.

The western-themed comic strip, which ran in 1951 and 1952, was written by Huemer and drawn by Paul Murry, best known for the scads of Mickey Mouse comics he drew. It wasn’t successful in terms of sales to newspapers, which explains its short life. And its short life helps explain why it’s not well-remembered.

Dick Huemer’s son, Richard Huemer, has been working with Gerhard Von Wowern for years to collect the Buck strips. Their hard work has finally paid in the form of a beautiful new book from Classic Comics Press. It collects the strips–a few, alas, are missing–and contains nicely-done biographical information on its creators, along with a bunch of interesting pieces of Huemer art. (He didn’t draw Buck O’Rue, but he was a pretty darn talented penman himself.)

The strip is in a Li’l Abner mode of humor; it’s funny and beautifully drawn, and suspenseful, even. It’s a shame it didn’t take off–and wonderful to have it back after 60 years.

Highly recommended. Yes, Scrappy is mentioned–along with Scrappyland.

Lou won an Academy Award. He wasn’t an actor, but he should have been. Lou created the Bugs Bunny cartoons that we all enjoyed so much. He wrote them and he drew them, and that’s how he earned his Oscar.

That’s Peter Falk talking about his friend Lou Lilly (1909-1999) in his 2006 memoir Just One More Thing. Lilly was important enough to Falk that he got an entire chapter to himself — “On What I Had and You Didn’t — a Lou Lilly in My Life” — mostly devoted to the practical jokes he played.

Falk was right about Lilly having an Oscar, and right about him working on Bugs Bunny cartoons–a couple of them, at least, Buckaroo Bugs and Hare Ribbin’, two Bob Clampett shorts on which Lilly received story credit. But Lilly didn’t get an Oscar for Bugs Bunny: He got one for Who’s Who in Animal Land, a 1944 “Speaking of Animals” film which he directed.

(If you’re reading this site, I probably don’t need to point out that Lou Lilly didn’t create Bugs Bunny; maybe Falk simply meant that he was among the creators of certain Bugs Bunny cartoons. Which is true.)

But this isn’t a Bugs Bunny site or a “Speaking of Animals” site — it’s a Scrappy site. And I bring all this up only because Peter Falk’s friend Lou got his start at the Charles Mintz studio. He animated on several Scrappys, including The City Slicker and Scrappy’s Rodeo. With Falk’s passing in 2011, we presumably lost the chance to learn whether he and Lilly ever discussed Scrappy. I hope they did and Falk simply neglected to mention it in his book.

(Thanks for Andrew Leal for bringing this Scrappy-related fact to my attention.)

Way back in 2004, I created a labor of love about a once-famous, long-forgotten cartoon character. His name was (and is) Scrappy, so I called it Scrappyland.

I launched the site in January of 2005 and added a substantial amount of new material in August of that year. Then I barely touched it. The site just sat there, but I knew it continued to be read, since I got regular e-mails from people who discovered it while researching Scrappy.

Scrappyland may have been dormant, but my interest in Scrappy never wavered. I continued to uncover new facts about him and acquire additional pieces of Scrappyana. I just didn’t do much with most of what I found except to enjoy it myself.

But now, at long last, I’m going to update Scrappyland again. Frequently, I hope: I’ve converted the whole site into a blog format, so it’ll be much easier to manage. And I have a lot to share.

All the material we’ve ever published is still here–use the links on the left and right to burrow through it. (If you need an introduction to Scrappy, here’s a good place to start.)

Twitter friends: Follow @scrappyland and I’ll alert you to new stuff as we post it.

I know I’m going to have fun with Scrappyland again. I hope you have fun reading it.