I have always been interested in comic books and comic strips. When I lived in Los Angeles, I wrote articles about comic history for a variety of publications including Comic Book Marketplace, Amazing Heroes, Comics Feature and many more including the historical introductions to the many issues from Malibu that compiled and reprinted old comic books and strips.
So naturally, when I was writing my latest book that has just been released, Off To Never Land: 70 Years of Disney's Peter Pan, I knew I wanted to include a chapter about Disney's Peter Pan in comics. Here is an excerpt.
Western Printing and Lithographing is often just referred to as Western Publishing and was based in Racine, Wisconsin. Western had a successful, long-standing relationship with Walt Disney Productions since 1937, when it took over the publication of the Mickey Mouse Magazine.
That magazine evolved into the comic book Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in October 1940. Western produced the material (writing, artwork and printing) for the comic book as well as other Disney comic books, but that division was financed and the comics distributed by Dell Publishing, so the comic books are referred to as Dell comics by comic book collectors.
Dell published many ongoing series featuring Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Chip 'n' Dale and many others. Often it would print “one-shot” issues under its Four Color brand to see if a Disney character might be popular enough to spark another series.
In addition, Dell would release adaptations of Disney films.
Peter Pan, a ten cent adaptation of the animated feature that is officially Four Color #442, was released November 3, 1952 with 32 pages written by Del Connell and illustrated by Al Hubbard.
It was translated and reprinted in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia and multiple U.S. re-printings.
In December 1952 Dell released the 32 page ten cent comic book entitled Captain Hook and Peter Pan revolving around a treasure hunt along with a one page treasure map crossword puzzle and a one page cut-out of Captain Hook.
However, a true treasure was the massive two hundred and twelve page Peter Pan Treasure Chest that was a huge square bound comic book that sold for fifty cents (five times the price of a regular comic book at the time and highly unusual) and was on the stands in January 1953 when the animated feature was in wide release.
Peter Pan Treasure Chest was a massive square-bound comic book.
The comic book was filled with original stories and multiple activity pages containing the following:
- Introduction Page (1 page)
- Movie adaptation (54 pages never reprinted in the U.S.) Artwork: Al Hubbard
- Rescue Tiger Lily (1 page activity)
- Round Trip Race for Two Players (2 page activity)
- Donald Duck Meets Peter Pan (20 pages illustrated by Bob Moore)
- Destination Never Land! (2 page text article)
- Pixieland (12 pages with Tinker Bell and Wendy illustrated by Dick Moores)
- I Can Fly! (1 page activity)
- Pan's Magic (1 page activity)
- Fed Up! (10 page adventure where Mr. Smee leaves Captain Hook and is illustrated by Harvey Eisenberg)
- The Living Shadows (10 pages with Peter Pan and Mickey Mouse, his nephews and Goofy illustrated by Jack Bradbury)
- Connect Each Dot (1 page activity)
- Shadow Land (1 page activity)
- The Buried Treasure (32 pages illustrated by Dick Moores) Adapted from “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold” from Four Color), #9 (October 1942) with Captain Hook taking the role played by Black Pete, Peter Pan taking the part Donald Duck played, but the parrot Yellow Beak remaining the same in both versions.
- Pirate Play (2 page activity)
- Bubbles the Water Baby, a story of Mermaid Lagoon (12 pages about a baby mermaid in Mermaid Lagoon illustrated by Harvey Eisenberg)
- The Swimming Lesson (1 page activity)
- Tic-Toc! Tic-Toc! (I page activity)
- Nursemaid Nana (12 pages with Nana and the Darling family illustrated by Jack Bradbury)
- Dog Tricks from Nana's Diary (2 page activity)
- John and Michael's Indian Adventure (16 pages by Jack Bradbury)
- Red Man Dance (2 page activity)
- Peter Pan as Little Flying Eagle (1 page activity)
- You Can Fly (half page song lyrics)
- A Pirate's Life (half page song lyrics)
- Tee Dum Tee Dee (half page song lyrics)
- What Made the Red Man Red? (half page song lyrics)
- When At Night In Bed I Lie (1 page activity)
- Captured by Indians (1 page activity)
To help promote the animated feature, Disney partnered with the Admiral company that was a maker of televisions and kitchen appliances like electric ranges and freezers.
The New Adventures of Peter Pan was distributed to promote Admiral appliances.
The company produced a 5″ x 7.25″ giveaway comic book in 1953 entitled The New Adventures of Peter Pan and illustrated throughout by Al Hubbard.
In a fourteen page story written by Don Christensen and drawn by Al Hubbard, the Admiral mascot – a tiny admiral in a red and gold uniform with a blue curved Admiral hat – has his treasure of Admiral television sets bought by Captain Hook. There are one hundred sets so everyone in Never Land can watch their favorite program.
In a fifteen page story written by Christensen and drawn by Hubbard, Wendy is fed up with cooking and takes Peter Pan and Tinker Bell back to London where she shows them the miraculous Admiral kitchen appliances and Peter uses a pouch of gold to buy them.
Tink covers them with pixie dust and the stove, freezer and refrigerator are able to fly back to Never Land because “Admiral Kitchen Appliances are the Happiest Thought in the World”.
Tinker Bell, especially with her association with Disneyland, was a popular character and Dell gave her two special one-shot issues to see if she might be able to be spun off into a continuing series like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Walt Disney's Adventures of Tinker Bell was a test to see if a Tink comic could fly.
Walt Disney's Adventures of Tinker Bell, that was released April 1958 and is officially identified as Four Color #896, featured the following contents:
- The Wishing Well (1 page illustrated by Al Hubbard explaining who Tinker Bell is)
- The Pirate Plot (10 pages illustrated by Al Hubbard)
- The Grounded Witch (8 pages illustrated by Al Hubbard with the Snow White Witch and Seven Dwarfs)
- Dumbo's Dilemma (7 pages written by Carl Fallberg and illustrated by Al Hubbard; A lion's roar spoils Dumbo's circus flight)
- The Delayed Parade (7 pages illustrated by Al Hubbard featuring Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket)
- Bath Problem (1 page story illustrated by Al Hubbard where Tinker Bell tries to take a bath but keeps getting interrupted by a hungry fish and a swarm of bees until she finally settles into a bird bath)
- Tinker Bell and Her Pixie Duster for You to Cut out and Fly (1 page activity of a full figure Tinker Bell on a kite-like mechanism)
Walt Disney's New Adventures of Tinker Bell, on sale April-June 1959 and officially identified as Four Color #982, contained the following contents:
- Wishing Star (1 page by Al Hubbard)
- Fleaing Feline (9 pages written by Carl Fallberg and illustrated by Al Hubbard. Tinker Bell is tricked into letting Lucifer into Cinderella's castle)
- Rainbow Rendezvous (6 pages illustrated by Al Hubbard; The Big Bad Wolf has stolen Casey Jr.'s bell)
- Outwitting the Wolf (8 pages illustrated by Al Hubbard; The Big Bad Wolf attacks the house of the Three Little Pigs using toys)
- The Little Giant (8 pages illustrated by Al Hubbard; Tinker Bell goes to another planet where everyone is smaller than she is)
- One 4 All and All 4 One (1 page activity)
- It's In the Cards (1 page activity)
- Visit Tinker Bell and Casey Jr. (1 page activity)
Peter Pan, Tinker Bell and other characters from the Peter Pan universe popped up in various Dell comic books in cameo appearances or short stories. Tinker Bell met Dumbo, Jiminy Cricket, Br'er Rabbit and others in stories illustrated by Tony Strobl and Pete Alvardo.
However the most frequently used character was Captain Hook because he was a great comic villain. At one point he was a member of the “Foul Fellows League” composed of the Old Witch from Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf and Black Pete. The poor captain was often just a straight man for a bunch of bit players like Madam Mim and the Beagle Boys.
Peter Pan #926 was released in 1959.
Frank A. Reilly managed Disney's comic strip department for 29 years, from 1946 to his retirement in 1975. King Features Syndicate distributed a Mickey Mouse comic strip (daily and Sunday), a Donald Duck comic strip (daily and Sunday), and Sunday-only installments of Uncle Remus and His Tales of Br'er Rabbit and Silly Symphonies comics that featured adaptations of both Disney short and feature cartoons.
In 1952, King Features began syndicating a Sunday-only comic strip entitled Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales that were multi-week adaptations of the latest Disney live action and animated feature films.
From January 4, 1953 (a month before the film opened) until fifteen weeks later on June 14, 1953, the strip featured an adaptation of Peter Pan written by Frank Reilly and drawn by Manuel Gonzales and Dick Moores. It is clear that the writer and artists on the strip extensively used reference material from the film for the story and artwork including mimicking stills from the film to tell the story.
In a June 1968 interview with writer Richard Hubler, Reilly remembered: “One day I was back in New York having lunch with the comics editor of King Features [Sylvan Byck]. He said, 'You know, one of these days, one of these years, we ought to get a special strip by Walt for the Christmas season'. I said, 'What do you mean one of these years? How about right now?' I sparked to it immediately.”
Basically, the Disney Christmas strip was designed to run daily six days a week from Monday through Saturday for three to four weeks or basically 24 installments total. It told a complete story with the final installment running on December 24, with Santa on his way to deliver his presents thanks to the assistance of some of the characters from Disney animated features.
Since there was already a Mickey Mouse and a Donald Duck comic strip, those characters were not used.
The strip did not appear on the regular comic strip page but usually at the bottom of the page somewhere else in the newspaper. This was designed to not only temporarily increase the circulation of the newspaper over the holiday season by having a “Disney exclusive” without dislodging a comic strip favorite but to make the reader flip through the rest of the pages to find it and often encounter the holiday advertising from local merchants in the process.
That first story was Peter Pan's Christmas Story written by Reilly with artwork by Manuel Gonzales. An introductory strip using artwork from the finished strip ran in newspapers on Saturday November 26, 1960 to alert readers to this new addition.
Peter Pan's Christmas Story ran from November 28 to December 24, 1960. It was written by Frank Reilly and drawn by Manuel Gonzales.
Peter Pan's Christmas Story was the first of the series of Disney Christmas strips.
It told the story of Captain Hook having his yearly tantrum about Christmas because it made him irritated that everybody was being so jolly and happy. Hook comes up with a plan to give Santa Claus a gift that was not to be opened until “Christmas Eve Eve” (December 23). In actuality, like the present he gave Peter Pan in the animated feature, it is a bomb that when it explodes will ruin Christmas for everybody.
He orders Smee to deliver the package and shoots him out of a cannon to send him to the North Pole. A suspicious Peter Pan has sent Tinker Bell to the Jolly Roger pirate ship to see if Hook is up to anything and she overhears the plan and reports back to Peter. They race to the North Pole to save Santa and Christmas.
Arriving at the North Pole with the present, Mr. Smee discovers that the Seven Dwarfs have relocated to the area to help Santa make presents. The crafty pirate disguises himself as the dwarf Bashful to deliver the present to Santa who is surprised and pleased to get a present himself after all these years.
Peter Pan arrives just before Santa opens the present and hurls the package out into the night where it lands next to Mr. Smee and blasts him back to Never Land while Santa and his sleigh start their Christmas deliveries. Peter and Tink wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
Santa Claus in Neverland ran from November 25 to December 24, 1968. It was written by Reilly and pencilled by Cliff Nordberg, who was a Disney Studio animator who had worked on the Peter Pan animated feature. It was inked by Manuel Gonzales.
In Never Land, Peter Pan is excited for the arrival of Christmas. Using his telescope, he takes a peek at Santa's workshop at the North Pole in time to see a blazing meteor hit nearby mountains, melting the snow and sending a flood sweeping toward the workshop.
Santa evacuates everyone else but is stranded on the roof of his workshop amidst rapidly rising water. Peter Pan arrives and sprinkles Santa with pixie dust and flies him to Never Land.
A distraught Santa fears that Christmas is lost since all the presents were destroyed and his helpers and reindeer scattered away. Peter proposes to build a new workshop in Never Land and with the assistance of the Lost Boys, Indians and mermaids as helpers to make new presents.
They hide these presents in Skull Rock so Captain Hook and the pirates won't cause any trouble. Hook finds out and in the dead of night has his crew load all the presents on the Jolly Roger with the surrender of Peter Pan as the ransom.
Peter sends Tink back to Earth to round up Santa's reindeer while he sneaks onto the pirate ship. He opens the ship's seacock allowing water to start to flood the ship causing Hook and his crew to think the ship is sinking so they abandon ship. Peter quickly turns the seacock off and starts the pump to empty the water.
Tink arrives with Santa's reindeer and harnesses them to the ship that she sprinkles with pixie dust to make it fly and Santa is able to use it as his makeshift sleigh to deliver the presents.
Captain Hook's Christmas Caper ran from November 29 to December 24, 1976. It was written by Carl Fallberg, penciled by Lorna Smith and inked by Larry Mayer.
While everyone prepared for the Yuletide festivities, the Seven Dwarfs are helping Santa finish all the toys in time for Christmas. However, the Foul Fellows League of Captain Hook, Big Bad Wolf and J. Worthington Foulfellow set in motion a terrible plan.
They send a letter to the Seven Dwarfs that Snow White is being held prisoner by the Old Witch so they must abandon Santa to go and rescue her. Santa and Pinocchio are left to finish up the work, but the villains arrive at the workshop offering to help.
When Santa and Pinocchio fall asleep from exhaustion, the villains steal all the toys. They leave a note that the Seven Dwarfs need to deliver four barrels of diamonds from their mine to Pirate Island in order to get the presents back.
Deep in the forest, the dwarfs meet Merlin who tells them that he just finished doing a show to entertain Snow White at Cinderella's Castle and she is safe. Merlin returns with them to Santa's workshop to devise a plan.
Merlin uses his magic to transform himself into a crocodile to scare Hook and make it easier to get into the pirate stronghold. Astride flying reindeer, crocodile Merlin, Santa and the dwarfs ride to Pirate Island, the gloomy stronghold of Captain Hook.
As the villains celebrate inside, crocodile Merlin interrupts the festivities and the villains are chased into the scullery and down the winding stairs to the main entrance. Outside, Santa and the dwarfs are waiting with a net and capture them. The villains are forced to work to finish the toys in time for Christmas.
Santa's sleigh transported all the toys from Pirate Island back to the workshop but the extra effort was too much for it. A restored Merlin magically enlarges one of Santa's toy sleighs so that it is big enough to hold all the toys for the Christmas Eve delivery.
A Peter Pan comic book from 1990.
No Puppets for Christmas ran from December 5 to December 24, 1977. It was written by Carl Fallberg, penciled by Willie Ito and inked by Larry Mayer.
As Santa takes inventory in his workshop, he discovers that twenty-four special mechanical puppets made by Gepetto have not arrived. He worries that Gepetto is somewhat absent minded so sends Peter Pan to go check and see what is wrong.
Peter takes Santa along with him and finds that the puppets have been stolen from Gepetto. Peter suspects it is Stromboli who has advertised a special holiday puppet show featuring twenty-four amazing puppets. Stromboli denies stealing the puppets. He actually had Honest John Foulfellow do it for him.
However, despite turning all the keys and pushing all the buttons, he cannot get the puppets to work. Cinderella's fairy godmother has broken her magic wand and Gepetto repairs it with her offering to repay him anytime he asks.
Stromboli begs Gepetto to come and fix the puppets to not disappoint all the little children who are planning to come see the show. The kindhearted Gepetto agrees to help but while fixing the puppets whispers into each of their ears. They spring into action and put Stromboli and Foulfellow out of commission while they escape with Gepetto.
Stromboli and Foulfellow give chase but fortunately Cinderella's Fairy Godmother arrives and traps the villains in a cage. In order to get the puppets and Santa back to the workshop in time, Peter Pan sprinkles pixie dust on them to fly back to the North Pole just in time for Christmas Eve.
Christmas Comes to Neverland ran from November 28 to December 24, 1983. It was written by Call Fallberg, penciled by Willie Ito and inked by Bill Langley.
Peter Pan visits Wendy in London while she is decorating the Darling family Christmas tree. Peter tells her that Santa Claus has never visited the Lost Boys in Never Land because they never wrote him letters; they have been lost so long they have forgotten Christmas.
Peter and Wendy fly to Santa's workshop where he tells them he doesn't know where Never Land is. Peter tells him how to get there and that they live in a hideout under an old tree. Wendy suggests decorating the tree with Christmas ornaments so Santa can find it.
When Peter and Wendy arrive, they can't find the Lost Boys so decorate the tree themselves, leave the boys a note and go off in search of them. The Lost Boys have been captured by Hook and are working on his ship as deckhands, scrubbing it against their will.
Through the telescope, Hook spots something sparkling on the island and assumes it is treasure. When he and Mr. Smee arrive they discover it is the Christmas ornaments and read the note. They take the ornaments back to the Jolly Roger to trick Santa to leave the Lost Boys presents on the ship and maybe steal the rest of Santa's toys as well.
Peter discovers Hook plans and with Wendy decides to surprise Hook with a present of his own, the fearsome crocodile that Hook fears. Later that night while the crocodile is sleeping, Peter and Wendy douse it with pixie dust and fly it to the ship and put in on deck. In the morning, Mr. Smee stumbles over it and wakes the angry crocodile who chases all the pirates and Hook off the ship.
Peter frees the Lost Boys just in time for Santa to arrive with his sleigh full of presents.
