Elmore's Debut

I was flipping through issue #55 of Dragon (November 1981), an issue I never owned – or saw – back in the day and only relatively recently acquired. There's a surprisingly large amount of interesting material in its 80 pages, to which I may return later. For the moment, I want to draw everyone's attention to a three-page comic that appeared in the issue, drawn by none other than Larry Elmore. Here's the first page.

Does this look at all familiar to anyone? Bear in mind this is 20 issues and nearly two years before the formal appearance of the first SnarfQuest comic, but it sure looks like Snarf, doesn't it – a prototype of the heroic zeetvah, to be sure, but the resemblance is clear. 

How is it that I've never seen anyone reference this comic before? The comic's story is intended to announce the arrival of Larry Elmore at TSR as a staff artist, making this (I presume) his first published work for the company (someone can correct me if I am mistaken in this). At any rate, my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw this and I thought it worth sharing with readers who might otherwise have not yet seen it.