SnarfQuest was a wacky black-and-white-ink comic series drawn and scripted by Larry Elmore, running in the back pages of Dragon Magazine from 1983 to 1989, alongside Trampier's full-color strip Wormy. According to www.larryelmore.com, it had a readership of from 80-100 thousand by the time the strip ended.
SnarfQuest followed the adventures of Snarf, a long-snouted, floppy-eared creature, in his quest to find fame, fortune, and really wild things. He is joined by Telerie, (a typical Elmore-babe - strikingly similar to Kitiara from the Dragonlance novels, with a penchant for chainmail bikinis and similar low-AC gear), Aveeare, a robot lost on an unknown planet (Snarf's world), and a host of other wacky (and often, low-intelligence) characters.
The gang starts off with a fairly normal D&D setting, but it quickly turns into a chaotic romp through different milieus, with Snarf accidentally slaying evil wizards, finding Willie, the dragon that's been hypnotized to believe he's a duck, getting knighted as "Snarfenja the Dragon-shooter" (as he takes down an ancient red dragon with a revolver - "look in this tube..."), hijacking a starship belonging to Aveeare's former owner, mining gold on a Star Frontierish planet, and so on.
TSR released the SnarfQuest graphic novel in 1987, which contained all the strips published in Dragon. Apparently, Dynasty Presentations (www.dynastypresentations.com) has reprinted the graphic novel in June 2001, along with 80 new never-before-seen strips, in order to boost sales of their new SnarfQuest collectible card game (found at www.gamesunplugged.com). New strips are also slated to appear every two months in their Games Unplugged magazine.
Quoting from Larry Elmore himself:
"One other comment: During the past year, many, many people have asked me and called me, even from Europe, about the similarity between Snarf and a certain character (which I will not name) from a BIG sci-fi movie recently released - not only the similarity in looks but even the story (the big race around the city)... Well, you decide for yourself. I guess someone thought SnarfQuest was just an obscure little strip that was no longer being published and maybe lifting a few ideas wouldn?t be so bad. I feel that if you are going to get ripped off a little, might as well get ripped off by the best. I would have liked it if they had just called and said, "Hey" - Just another adventure in this ol? life, eh? By the way, I hated that character, which we will not name. He is not like Snarf."
You can see a sample on Elmore's webpage at http://www.larryelmore.com/SnarfComic/SnarfComic1.html.
atesh adds: the Dragon Archive CD released a few years ago has all the Dragon
mag issues from 1 - 250, so it has all the original strips.
Some details taken from www.larryelmore.com, www.dynastypresentations.com, www.rpg.net and an old pile of Dragons I've just unearthed. I can't find any Dragons newer than August 1986, though, so I can't comment on any storyline beyond that.