I royally screwed up my explanation of the Three Mouseketeers comic book earlier and I can't explain why because I know this stuff. I don't know my federal tax I.D. number or how to find the volume of a cone, but I know stuff like this. So ignore what I wrote earlier and replace that knowledge in your cranium with what follows…
A strip called "The Three Mouseketeers" initially appeared in Funny Stuff, which was a comic book published by All-American, which was kind of a sister company to DC Comics. Sheldon Mayer was the editor at All-American and he apparently created these Three Mouseketeers, but he only drew one or two stories of them. This strip was set in swashbuckling days and apart from their punny title, these three mice had nothing to do with the ones that came along later. DC later bought out and absorbed the All-American line, and Sheldon Mayer moved over and worked for them for the rest of his life.
In the mid-fifties, when sales were down and DC couldn't figure out what to publish, they decided to have Mayer create, write and draw two kid-oriented comics. Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace was getting popular as a newspaper strip and in comic books so they asked Mayer to come up with something in a similar vein. Using his own kids for inspiration, Mayer concocted Sugar & Spike, which many today consider one of the twenty-or-so best comic books ever done.
The other mandate was to use the old title of "The Three Mouseketeers," apparently to tie in vaguely with the then-popular Mickey Mouse Club on TV. Mayer didn't want to do a "period" strip so he came up with three mice — Fatsy, Patsy and Minus — eluding cats in a contemporary setting. The two comics debuted at the same time in 1956 and for a time, Mayer managed to do both but it was just too much work. As Sugar & Spike was the more personal of the two, he kept it and handed off The Three Mouseketeers to others — although in this interview, Mayer's daughter says she thinks her father had more fun with the mouse strip.
It has been reported that Mayer wrote some of the Three Mouseketeers comic stories after he handed the artwork over to Rube Grossman, a veteran New York animator who drew a lot of cartoony comic books for DC over the years. I don't know that that's so. Sy Reit, who wrote most of the scripts told me that whatever ones he didn't write were written by Grossman, and that as far as he knows, Mayer never wrote any after he stopped drawing that book. So make of that what you will.
(By the way, die-hard Sheldon Mayer fans know this but in case you don't: Sugar & Spike was cancelled in 1971. Sales were poor and so was Mayer's eyesight. There was still a huge demand for Mayer's toddlers overseas, where the work was reprinted and reprinted, time and again. So when his cataracts were treated to the point where he could draw again, he did a number of stories that were intended only for foreign publication. Some of them later turned up in a digest DC published but most of them have never been seen in America.)
Everything else I said in the earlier piece was correct, especially the part about Three Mouseketeers plummeting in sales when Mayer left it. My apologies for the screw-up and my thanks to Bob Heer and Steven Rowe, each of whom dropped me a nice note to whomp me upside the head about it.