Today in Comics History, June 8: The Three Stooges Blow Up the Planet, more like

from The Three Stooges Meet Hercules one-shot (Dell, August 1962), pencils and inks by Sparky Moore

Today in Comics History, May 14, 1777: Captain Skid prays to his God that his letter is not found by idiots

from Four Color #1187 [The Three Stooges] (Dell, June 1961); pencils, inks, and letters by Joe Messerli

Today in Comics History, May 13: Happy birthday, Norman Maurer!

Let's all give a big hip-hip-hooray today (because it's his birthday) for Norman Maurer, born today in 1926! He's not a huge a household name even within the comics fandom, but he oughta be: he's tremendously influential for his comic books featuring the Three Stooges: Norman's wife Joan was the daughter of original Stooge Moe Howard, and Norm co-managed the Stooges in their post-Columbia careers, wrote the screen stories for their movies The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962), The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962), The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze (1963) and The Outlaws Is Coming! (1965) — the last two of which he also directed. In animation, he was a writer for Scooby-Doo, Speed Buggy, and Richie Rich, altho' we won't hold that last one against him.

Maurer created the first 3-D comics at St. John's Publishing (with Joe Kubert), and he's the co-creator and inker (again with Kubert) of Tor, the classic comic book series starring a warrior caveman from 1,000,000 BC (now at DC). He didn't create Raquel Welch, though. (Sigh.)

Look here, he was a part of Joe Kubert's early foray into creating his famous The Kubert School for comics artists!


from St. John comics cover-dated June 1954