First appeared in The Comic Reader #174, November 1979

Jim Engel: Hmmm…. not a LOT to say about this one… I DO remember by this time trying with every page to throw in an interesting “camera angle” or two… I was as influenced by the “realistic” artists who drew all my favorite super-heroes & adventure strips (Eisner, John Buscema, Kirby, Romita, etc.) as I was by Walt Kelly and the great funny animal cartoonists, so I was trying (however primitively) to employ storytelling that was more like The Spirit or The Avengers than the basic standard funny animal comic. I remember enjoying doing the last three panels of mob violence, and I was really starting to enjoy doing the coloring when I got to that part of the process… THIS “pals” was sort of continued from the LAST “pals”…

From 1976, one of Jim’s earliest greeting cards for Mark I features pre-DICK DUCK cameos of PAVLOV (hugging Jim’s future wife Charis as the Statue of Liberty), “PALS” (with the boy in a blue striped shirt, and the dog with a black nose), and Elton John–one of Jim’s musical obsessions at the time. (The funky look to the outlines is the scanner picking up the embossing of the characters on the card).

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