Number 2071: Little Jacky, who never grew up

Uh-oh. I can “see” some of you readers, and the puzzled looks on your faces. You are wondering what I am showing today. A strip by a kid? It was the same problem of many readers (including me, age 11 1/2) when first encountering the Sunday-only comic strip, Jackys Diary, in January 1959.

Jack Mendelsohn (age 32 1/2 at the time) drew the Sunday page, and a one-shot comic book from Dell Comics in 1960. Mendelsohn worked in comics (including EC Comics’ Panic) and animation (among other things, he worked on Yellow Submarine). He was a talented artist and writer. Don Markstein’s Toonopedia website has a concise history of Jackys Diary, which, for whatever reason, became Jacky’s Diary (with apostrophe), both for the one-shot and the beautiful 2013 coffee table book produced by Craig Yoe and Clizia Gussoni, reprinting the three years of the strip.* As Mendelsohn explained it in the book, a Sunday-only strip was more expensive to maintain than a daily/Sunday combination, so King Features canceled it.

Jack Mendelson, (age 90), died this past January.

Panel two, just below,  is hard to read under the purple ink. I have divined the caption for you: "Jack got scared the giant would eat him also so he tried to not make any noise inside."

*Still available, as of this writing. Highly recommended by me.

Posted in: Pappy Comics