Finding the manufacture of gun barrels boring, however, he joined the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant and was assigned to decoding messages on Guam (1944-1946).

Returning to civilian life, he worked for a time as a correspondent for the Clarksburg [West Virginia] Exponent Telegram before starting his own weekly newspaper.

He led a campaign to preserve the house in Hillsboro, West Virginia, where Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, was born.

In 1957 Comstock and McClung established The West Virginia Hillbilly, which became a celebrated repository of Appalachian folklore, heritage and humor.

A 2016 tribute published in The Paris Review, asserted that “The Hillbilly wasn’t just a paper—it was an art project, a platform for historic preservation, a conservative wailing wall, and, above all, an exploration of the West Virginian id.”[2] The paper's run ended in 1980.