My friend Carolyn was just reading this here weblog and she pointed out a funny typo that I made which I'm not going to correct. In the previous message here, I referred to a certain candy bar as "Three Mouseketeers." That's wrong. Actually, the candy bar I never liked was named "Three Musketeers" — and by the way, I never understood why they called it that. What in the name of Douglas Fairbanks do musketeers have to do with "whipped, fluffy chocolate nougat covered in rich milk chocolate?" The name "Three Mouseketeers" is stuck in my head because it was a wonderful little comic book feature, written and drawn by the great Sheldon Mayer. It debuted in 1944 in a DC comic called Funny Stuff and it wasn't until 1956 that the three mice — Patsy, Fatsy and Minus — received their own book. It was, like everything else Mr. Mayer did, a very funny funnybook.
At the time, Mr. Disney's Mickey Mouse Club was the number one kids' show on television and one wonders if someone at DC decided to launch the comic figuring that the name "Mouseketeers" (which was what they called Annette and Cubby and all the rest) now had some extra appeal in the marketplace. By then, Mayer was doing his acclaimed comic, Sugar and Spike, and for a while, he attempted to do both books. Eventually though, the workload was too much for him and he reluctantly gave up the Mouseketeers as it was less of a personal work — though it is said he still felt like he was giving up one of his children. An artist named Rube Grossman handled the mice thereafter, sometimes writing his own stories, sometimes drawing scripts by Sy Reit. I thought they did an adequate job of aping and occasionally equalling Mayer's work but the readers apparently sensed the difference as sales promptly plunged to cancellation levels. Years later, DC revived the title with Mayer reprints but it got lost amidst a line of super-hero and war comics. That was a shame because it was a good comic book — and a much better treat than that awful candy bar.