Number 797

Comical Comics Week: The Three Mouseketeers

This is the final day of Comical Comics Week, and with it, Pappy's theme month. On Sunday we go back to the regular style postings.

Sheldon Mayer created The Three Mouseketeers in 1956 for DC Comics. There had been another set of Three Mouseketeers--not the same characters--created in 1944. I showed one of their adventures in Pappy's #212. Mayer's Three Mouseketeers are different than the original Three Mouseketeers. My guess is that the popular Walt Disney TV show, The Mickey Mouse Club, which featured a group of pre-teen "Mouseketeers," was the reason for this strip. Since DC already had claim to the name Mouseketeers* they could tie in to the show by association with the title, and Disney couldn't do a thing about it.

Fatsy, Patsy and Minus were funny characters in the best Shelly Mayer tradition. You can read about them here. These two stories are from The Three Mouseketeers #3, 1956. The young boy in the story, "Working On The Railroad" looks like an older version of Spike, another character S.M. created that year in the comic book, Sugar and Spike. Spike was based on Mayer's son, Lanny. I assume this boy is, also. So did Mayer caricature himself as the pipe-smoking dad?

*For maximum confusion, Tom and Jerry starred in a spin-off comic called The Two Mouseketeers at Dell.

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Number 737


The old-timer


When it comes to the history of comic books and men who began their careers when comic books were first published, you can't find anyone more historic than Sheldon Mayer. He was not only with comic books when they were born, but when they were embryonic. Before he went to work for Max Gaines at All-American Comics as an editor/cartoonist, Mayer, who was barely 18 in 1935, was working as a production assistant to Gaines, cutting and pasting up comic strip original art into comic book format.

Mayer's career is recounted in The Amazing World of DC Comics #5, published in 1975 when Shelly was still working for DC, albeit on a mostly part-time basis. He had trouble with his eyes and gave up cartooning for a time. The examples of original art shown here, culled from Heritage Auctions, are of strips done after the operation to remove his cataracts.

The Sugar and Spike story, from The Best of DC #41, is from 1983, and the unlettered "Gregor's Grisly Grotto" was intended for Plop!. I have a complete set of Plop!, but I'm too lazy to look at them to see if it ever made it into print. Whatever. It's funny, and a good counterpoint to the sweetness of Sugar and Spike.

There's a story to the autographed digest comic you see at the top of this posting. I found it a few years ago in a thrift store. I always pick up and look at comic books in thrift stores and when I saw the autograph I...well, you've heard the expression, "clutched it to my bosom." I held it in a death grip until I paid the 50¢ they wanted for it and was out the door. I still puzzle over why it was there, who "Steven" is, or why he let this go. It has a good home with me, though, and I'm glad I was the one who got it. Whatever collecting gods there are made sure I was in that junky store on that day, at that time, and that I, of all people, was the one who found it.

The original art featured in this post is taken from Heritage Auctions web site.

Sheldon Mayer, cartoonist, editor, writer, and one of the most important men in the early history of American comic books, died in 1991, aged 74.



























There's another great story by Shelly Mayer in Pappy's #664.

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Number 664


"Dear Senator..."


Sheldon Mayer was with DC Comics from the days before Superman and Batman. He was an editor for Max Gaines' All-American Comics branch of the company known collectively as DC. He quit his editor job so he could draw Scribbly, a very funny, somewhat autobiographical view of himself as a boy cartoonist. In 1956 he created Sugar and Spike, for which he's mainly--and justifiably--known. But late in life Shelly Mayer did try other genres, including science fiction and horror. He wrote and drew "Dear Senator" for Unexpected #217 in 1981.

It's hard to tell if he was trying for a more serious style, because some of his cartoony side shows up, like the robot which looks more like something from the 1930s or '40s. But I like this fish-out-of-water story, anyway. Who can resist a story about Abraham Lincoln brought to the future?

I took the original art from Heritage Auctions. I love looking at original art, but if you don't you can scroll down to the printed version.

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