A hot-tempered bird like Donald Duck quite naturally has lots of rivals and enemies! The original Disney short cartoons often showed Don in conflict with Pegleg Pete, the bullying catfaced felon who also fought Oswald, Mickey, and Goofy. Then there’s Neighbor Jones, the inventive backyard brawler created for comics by Carl Barks. Barks also devised Gladstone Gander, Donald’s smugly lucky cousin; the Beagle Boys, whom Donald often battles on Uncle Scrooge’s behalf; and Argus McSwine, the rich and extra-amoral pig villain.

And then there’s Hard Haid Moe.  

Dick Kinney, longtime cartoon scripter for Walter Lantz and King Features as well as Disney, became a Disney comics writer in 1962. That’s when Walt’s Burbank studio launched a comics production program aimed primarily at overseas affiliate publishers. Editor George Sherman asked Kinney and other writers to create “new characters… to bring out facets of existing characters, (and to) give the stories more variety.” Dick Kinney decided to pique Donald’s temper with a hillbilly enemy, a noisy backwoodsman who could combine elements of Snuffy Smith, Yosemite Sam, and Disney’s own Martins and the Coys from Make Mine Music in 1946. For the Donald and Fethry Duck story “It’s Music” in 1964, Kinney created a bumpkin initially named Hog Haid Moe.

Short, stocky, and heavily bearded, Moe shot first and asked questions later! This led to big trouble when Donald or Uncle Scrooge needed things that Moe had, or entered territory that Moe considered his. And then there was Fethry. The idealistic beatnik naively considered Moe his pal, despite all bullet wounds to the contrary! Moe’s only real friends tended to be Huey, Dewey, and Louie, mainly due to their mutual love of nature.

Moe’s name and personality were derived from a classic old tune, Maurice Abrahams’ “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”. Covered over the years by the likes of Jimmy Durante, Eddy Howard, and even the University of Wyoming Cowboys, the song described a prickly wild Westerner who got along well with animals, but held human folks off with a loaded weapon…unless he felt like invading their territory and “spielin’ on the dance-hall floor,” as only a hillbilly in the city could do. The chorus of the song ran like this:

“He always sings raggy music to the cattle
As he swings back and forward in the saddle […]He’s a high-falutin’, scootin’, shootin’
Son of a gun from Arizona
Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”

The story “It’s Music?” gave Moe this variation:

“I always sing when I shoot my repeater
As I swing at the goldurn city critter
I’m a high-falutin’, slicker-shootin’
Son of a gun from Old Hog Run […]Bad ol’ Hog Haid Moe!”

The only thing left to be further defined about Moe were his worn-out bloodhound Houn’ Dawg, and his name. Perhaps “Hog Haid Moe” was meant to imply a pigfaced character, but artist Al Hubbard drew Moe as a big-nosed human. From the third story produced, “Mountain Magic,” Moe’s diminutive switched to “Hard Haid,” as it remains.

“Mountain Magic” was also the only Moe story to be published in North America for a shocking 34 years! As a rule, North American Disney comics licensee Western Publishing tended to avoid stories produced by Sherman’s Burbank unit. “Mountain Magic” slipped through by appearing in a Disney sponsored giveaway magazine with which Western was not involved.

Over the next three-plus decades, Moe became particularly popular with Brazilian and Italian Disney readers, eventually appearing in numerous locally produced stories as well as those made in Burbank. At various times from the 1970s to the present, Moe has even had his own starring comic book in Brazil! Meanwhile, here in his country of origin, he was effectively unknown.

That changed, at least somewhat, when several of Moe’s vintage stories have now appeared in the U.S., including Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #689, which counted “Marriage Mountain-Style” among its contents. The story also introduced his dangerous grown-up niece Amy Lou.