"I’m 81 years old and on a hunt for “The Heap," a none-too-heroic comic hero I prayed..."

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I’m 81 years old and on a hunt for “The Heap," a none-too-heroic comic hero I prayed would return to Mad Magazine, but he didn’t while I was a member of the waiting crowd. What an idea! A comics critter who wandered around with banana peels and spinach cans (all tiny as postage stamps compared to him) falling unnoticed and unmissed from his body, which was made of garbage, just exactly like all the rest of us are, this wonderful epic implied, but not by hitting you over the head with the bottom of a frying pan.

I can’t remember any more details, only that I thought it was the most hilarious invention I’d seen since a few of Elzie Segar’s wilder ideas in the ’30s, and what a compliment that was. Al Capp & Walt Kelly were certainly on speaking terms with hilarity too, and I’d been too young to cuddle Krazy Kat. Segar’s Popeye I inhaled from an oversized b&w-only comic book of the cusp-30s/40s; the format was never repeated, and the rats in my mother’s kitchen consumed the spine just before I let the rest go too. Its title was “Popeye & the Search for Poopdeck Pappy," and I would never have seen that story again but for the publication of Segar’s 1936 dailies in the Fantagraphics likewise oversized books of today.)

I’d be very grateful if somebody could point me in the direction of another look at “The Heap" before I too fall to earth just behind whatever Great Carcass may be shuffling around with me as, perhaps, some part of his personage.

”

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A comment left last night on my old blog, on a review of Mad Magazine #5. I followed the comment’s profile to Thomas Wark, a retired newspaper editor.

I just wanted to post this comment. I thought it was touching. It got me to thinking about how some comics just stick with us through the years. Now I’ll try and send Thomas a digital copy of Mad Magazine #5. I believe I still have mine here, somewhere. 

But if someone can help me learn more about The Heap, I’d appreciate it.