Mel Lazarus
Encyclopedia
Mell Lazarus is an American novelist and cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...

, best known as the creator of two comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

s, Miss Peach
Miss Peach
Miss Peach was a syndicated comic strip created by American cartoonist Mell Lazarus. It ran for 45 years, from February 4, 1957 to September 8, 2002....

(1957-2002) and Momma
Momma
Momma is an English language comic strip by Mell Lazarus which debuted on October 26, 1970. Initially distributed by the Publishers-Hall Syndicate, it is currently handled by Creators Syndicate and published in more than 400 newspapers worldwide....

(1970-present). For his comic strip Pauline McPeril (a 1966-69 collaboration with Jack Rickard
Jack Rickard
Jack Rickard , an illustrator for numerous advertising campaigns, was best known as a key contributor to Mad for more than two decades....

, he used the pseudonym Fulton.

A native of Brooklyn, Lazarus began as a professional cartoonist when he was a teenager. During his twenties, he worked for Al Capp
Al Capp
Alfred Gerald Caplin , better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip Li'l Abner. He also wrote the comic strips Abbie an' Slats and Long Sam...

 and his brother Elliott Caplin at the Capp family-owned Toby Press, which published Al Capp's Shmoo Comics
Shmoo
A shmoo is a fictional cartoon creature. Created by Al Capp , it first appeared in his classic comic strip Li'l Abner on August 31, 1948, and quickly became a postwar national craze in the USA....

, among other titles.

In 1964, Lazarus talked about his background and working methods:
I never actually graduated high school. My art teacher flunked me. I have since, however, attended many classes of one kind or another. I frequently lecture at colleges and to other groups around the country. I sold my first cartoon when I was 16. I did commercial art and edited children’s magazines prior to February 4, 1957 when my comic, Miss Peach, was launched. The characters in Miss Peach are not actually modeled on real persons, with the possible exception of Lester, the skinny kid in the strip. Possibly the most loved character is Arthur, the dopey little kid. I make notes all week based on thoughts, conversational fragments, etc. I sift through all these notes on Monday mornings and select several to develop. I then write gags for them. I do six daily strips and a Sunday page
Sunday strip
A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in color. Some readers called these sections the Sunday funnies...

.

Books

His novel The Boss Is Crazy, Too (Dial, 1954) was inspired in part by his experiences as an editor at Toby Press. Mike Weber described the storyline:
Mel Lazarus' great novel of the early days of the Silver Age
Silver Age of Comic Books
The Silver Age of Comic Books was a period of artistic advancement and commercial success in mainstream American comic books, predominantly those in the superhero genre. Following the Golden Age of Comic Books and an interregnum in the early to mid-1950s, the Silver Age is considered to cover the...

, The Boss Is Crazy Too, features a production manager who literally knows nothing about his job; he's the publisher's wife's unemployable cousin, and giving him a job is part of the price of getting family money to keep the company afloat. The artists hate him, and the inker has a habit of lettering obscenities in areas that are going to be solid black, just to honk him off. He's positive that, one day, the black isn't going to cover it up. So one week, the bullpen crew grab one of the sample bundles of comics coming into the office, and, with a rubber stamp and dark grey ink, stamp an obscene word in the same place in a black doorway the hero has just emerged from, gun blazing. And then they tie the bundle back up and leave him to find it.


The Neighborhood Watch (Doubleday, 1986) is about an impoverished Brooklyn writer who steals from his wealthy neighbors. It was once optioned for a film. Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...

reviewed:
Loring Neiman, writer, widowed father, good neighbor, is also a thief. That is to say, when his book is rejected and the mortgage is in default, Neiman starts to rob his neighbors, and discovers that he is very good at his new craft. Lazarus... depicts his protagonist as a sympathetic, sensitive and earnest person, and he peoples Neiman's Brooklyn neighborhood with a pleasant collection of Jewish characters who are just on the safe side of predictable. After Neiman becomes involved in an affair with a married woman, he decides to give up his criminal activities, but one neighbor with a shady past forces him to do one more job. Wry and modestly entertaining, the novel fails to build to a forceful ending, cashing in instead with a somewhat mushy courtroom climax.

Awards

Lazarus served as President of the National Cartoonists Society
National Cartoonists Society
The National Cartoonists Society is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops...

 for two consecutive terms from 1989 to 1993. He won the National Cartoonists Society's Humor Comic Strip Award for 1973 and 1979. He was given the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year for his work on Miss Peach in 1981, and he received their Silver T-Square Award in 2000.

A member of Mensa
Mensa International
Mensa is the largest and oldest high-IQ society in the world. It is a non-profit organization open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardised, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test...

, Lazarus has lived in Los Angeles since the 1970s. He has three daughters.

External links

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