Kelly & Duke was a daily and Sunday comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 drawn and written by Jack Moore and syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate

Universal Press Syndicate

Universal Press Syndicate, a subsidiary of Andrews McMeel Universal, is the world's largest independent press syndicate. It distributes lifestyle and opinion columns, comic strips and other content. Popular columns include Dear Abby, Ann Coulter, Roger Ebert and News of the Weird...

. It began in 1972, then known as Kelly, but changed to Kelly & Duke title in 1974.

The strip centers around a boy named Kelly, whose pet and best friend is Duke, an anthromorphic dog

Dog

The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...

 with a Southern accent. The strip's cast was made up with Roscoe, a beatnik

Beatnik

Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...

 cat

Cat

The cat , also known as the domestic cat or housecat to distinguish it from other felids and felines, is a small, usually furry, domesticated, carnivorous mammal that is valued by humans for its companionship and for its ability to hunt vermin and household pests...

.

While the strip was not as popular as Universal's earlier comic Doonesbury

Doonesbury

Doonesbury is a comic strip by American cartoonist Garry Trudeau, that chronicles the adventures and lives of an array of characters of various ages, professions, and backgrounds, from the President of the United States to the title character, Michael Doonesbury, who has progressed from a college...

, it had enough fanbase to place the comic in a "cult" status.

There were no book collections of Kelly and Duke, although a children's book based on the strip, What is God's Area Code?, was published in 1974 as part of the Cartoon Stories for the New Children

The strip ended its run in 1980.