Del Connell’s career in animation and comics spanned over half a century. After being a storyman at the Disney Studio, he went on to create characters and stories for Western Printing’s successful line of comic books based on animated, TV, and movie series. He then became an editor and later a managing editor at Western, but he also found the time to write daily and Sunday gags for the Mickey Mouse strip and other newspaper comics.
At the time, Wayne DeWald was just beginning work as a corporate writer, a career that eventually spanned more than forty years, but he was also a big comic-book fan. He was a member of an amateur press alliance (a group of writers who print a pre-determined number of copies of a contribution sent to a central mailer, who then selects a copy from each contributor and staples them all into one magazine-sized fanzine and then sends a copy back to each of the contributors) called CAPA-Alpha (or K-a) that was the very first comics amateur press alliance.
Wayne, who lived in Florida at the time, wanted to do a series of profiles on animation and comic-book artists and so wrote to them in hopes of getting a response that he could use in his zine for CAPA-Alpha that was called Therefore. The membership of that amateur press alliance was less than fifty members, so very few people ever saw DeWald’s work. […]
