3 Bears comic story from 1951

[Matthew Hunter]

For those of you who haven't checked out the Misce-Looneyous Blog lately (shame on you), now's a good time! I've been posting some rare treasures from the Dell "Bugs Bunny Christmas Funnies" comic books, including this adaptation of "Bear Feat". It's one of the few stories in the Christmas Funnies books that don't have a holiday theme, but it's also one of the only straight adaptations of an actual cartoon I've seen from Dell.

http://toolooney.blogspot.com/2008/12/bear-feat-1951.html

[Fibber Fox]

Matthew, who was drawing these? Was it Tom McKimson or Phil De Lara? Or were they not at Dell?

F. Fox

[David Gerstein]

McKimson was definitely still at Dell, though I don't believe he usually inked his own work at this point (inked by others, he's harder to identify—his once-distorted, Clampett-unit style from the mid-1940s had by now become much more basic). De Lara was there too, though my initial thought is that this isn't his.

Unfortunately, I'm no expert on the non-Disney Dell funny animal artists from 1950 forward. A lot of new talent came onto the Warner characters as the line expanded—with giants and more one-shot books—and I'm not very well versed in who drew what. In the past, other fans and I often raced to accredit almost all stories to the most obvious suspects, but there actually may have been many more hands on these things than we know.
That said, I can rather confidently identify the Warner styles of Carl Buettner, Vivie Risto, Al Hubbard, Tony Strobl, and Ralph Heimdahl, and I'm fairly certain this isn't theirs.

Back to square one: McKimson inked by someone else? Maybe. But I really don't want to be too sure.