Retired Characters

Written by Adam

This article has been on the back burner for a while because I've wanted to talk about the fact that some characters have gone into semi-retirement and you simply don't see some of them anymore. Granted, some characters work better in certain types of stories than others, but there certainly seems to be less of a rotation of "regulars" the closer the magazine got to the new millennium. For the sake of argument, I want to take a look at one character that definitely went into retirement--Wally Wolf--and the reason it is obvious is because he was entirely written out of an adventure story he had a major part in.

Wally Wolf is seen in this 1973 adventure (left) on caged animals in roadside zoos. Five years later, the same story was rewritten, and Cubby takes his place.

Why was Wally removed? I really don't know...he was an interesting character from the early days of the magazine because Ranger Rick would often run and try to escape from Wally Wolf. So was Wally ever on Rick's side? It was good to show that perhaps not all animals will simply get along with others. On the other hand, perhaps this got in the way when presenting stories about conservation, and the side story of running from Wally was just getting old after seven years. Whatever the reason, Wally clearly was gone by the mid-1970s.

Wally is hardly the only character to have been retired. Take a look at these lists I have made based on who has been showing up in the magazine based on the years the magazine has been published. A "regular" is a character who always seemed to appear in every issue of the magazine. "Last seen" indicates a character that was last seen in an adventure story during this period of time.

I want everyone to be aware, these charts aren't definitive, especially when it comes to the later years, and the issues from 2000 onward. I don't own very many issues from 2000 and beyond, and while I do try to keep up with current Ranger Rick adventures on the official website, I do miss stuff. This is simply to give a general idea of who is still prominently featured in the adventure stories and who has not been around much lately.

I asked design director, Donna Miller about the topic of retired characters in the adventures. Her response to me:

None of the characters have been officially retired, and we'll occasionally use one of these characters when we need them for the storyline. (Odora is in the rattlesnake roundup story, for example, because we needed her spray to fend off the snake collectors, and we'll use Ollie when we need a character who can dive or swim.)

The reason we use fewer characters overall is that we need to limit the amount of dialog in the comic strip format and it's too hard to fit several characters into the panels.

That is about as official as the story comes. While nobody may be officially retired, some clearly are not around as much as they once were. Its a shame that a longtime character is no longer as featured as they once were, but it does make sense that a comic can only provide so much space. I still wonder if Wally Wolf is chasing Jack Rabbit in semi-retired wonderland and if the two major beaver characters, Bobby and B.J. have a den somewhere near Canada....