Maisy The Mutt in Death Marches On
A still frame from “Death Marches On”
Maisy the Mutt and Hobble the Hound are falling down into a dark pit. Hobble looks frightened while Maisy looks excited.
One of the most important cartoons in Maisy the Mutt’s history, this cartoon marked the end of the period in which specters and ghouls reigned within the work. As discussed countless times throughout the history and archive articles, Maisy was a character who started with a very macabre nature.
Following Liquid Laff's success and subsequent acquisition by Stencil Line, the darker features of her cartoons were removed; from the works themselves and from history. However this was not a change which happened overnight. Despite their new owners and demands from Stencil Line top brass, Ivan – and by extension, Lewis – held a degree of control within their studio. If displeased with the instructions from above, Liquid Laff’s normally fluid animation output had a way of slowing to a tar-like speed. When he was briefly fired from his own company by the new owners, the entire animation studio (which if you may remember consisted of friends and friends of friends) went with him and Stencil Line panickedly rehired him in fear of financial losses.
George Lyman, key art director for Death Marches On
Drawing gifted to Ivan Hoth by George Lyman after he was fired from Liquid Laff
A caricature drawing of Ivan Hoth looking upset, holding files and an umbrella under his arm. The text beside him reads “Good luck next time Ivan! From George”.
Drawing jokingly gifted to Ivan Hoth by Geroge Lyman after he was quickly rehired by Stencil Line
A caricature drawing of Ivan Hoth sitting in a chair and smiling while shaking the hand of Maisy the Mutt. The text reads “Cheers for our new hire!”
Concept sketches for Death Marches On by Liquid Laff artist Curtis Brenner
Two nearly identical sketches of Maisy the Mutt telling Hobble the Hound to follow a path through the graveyard. The top version features larger tombstones while the bottom version’s tombstones are regular sized.
Following this incident, Ivan would go on to renegotiate the details of his employment and that of his studio workers, something Stencil Line rashly complied with. No, there were no allusions of any sort of friendship between the two companies, no matter how things may have looked on the surface, however what this meant was that ultimately (up until Ivan’s death) Stencil Line left the studios animations alone. Yes, there were occasional acts of malice, such as the theft of Millie Moonbeam (Stencil Line drafted the contract of which Liquid Laff had no part in approving), but Maisy and the nature of her cartoons remained fairly free-range in terms of content they could cover.
Death Marches On would be the final animation created under Lewis and Ivan’s guidance, and it was a spectacle to be sure. Everyone in the company pitched in for this production and after months of work, the final result was a ghoulish animation detailing Maisy the Mutt introducing her many ghostly family members and the dead of the world to a returning Hobble the Hound before enthusiastically burying him alive for trying to steal her magic hat. The production could be seen as a final send off from Ivan whose health was rapidly deteriorating at this point, and one could argue that the subject of mortality was weighing very heavily on his mind. The animation switched between many settings such as Maisy’s living haunted house, a vast graveyard that stretched on like a city block, and an abstract void like space in which ghosts and corpses fell into a vast pile of the recently deceased far below the soil. This last location was visited when Maisy grabbed Hobble and jumped into a coffin that went down for miles. The animation was very controversial internally with Stencil Line nearly firing Ivan again. However by this point he had become a well known face in American culture, so firing him would have caused them unwanted controversy. In this way Ivan continuously skirted the line and escaped his employer's wrath. Much like Barbara Massey of Dorothy Do fame, the man had an unusual pattern of getting what he wanted despite all odds.
Concept sketch for Death Marches On by Liquid Laff artist Curtis Brenner
Maisy introduces Hobble to her ghostly family. Hobble is shaking the hand of Chopper the ghost with a shocked expression on his face. Behind Chopper several more ghosts leer at Hobble eagerly.
Concept drawing for Death Marches On by Liquid Laff artist Margaret Clayton
An old gothic house sits surrounded by hedges. The house’s windows are boarded up and ghosts lurk around the smoke from the chimney. Two small eyes on either side of the front doors make it resemble a smiling face.
Concept sketches for Death Marches On by Liquid Laff artist Patrick Smith
On the left, Maisy admires a guillotine. To the right, three ghosts rise out of their graves. Up top a stray Maisy stands with her hands out.
Storyboards for Death Marches On by Liquid Laff artist Curtis Brenner
Maisy shakes Hobbles hand. Hobble waves goodbye to Maisy and starts to walk away. Hobble suddenly realizes something. The camera pans out to reveal Hobble has walked off the edge of a cliff, and is standing on nothing but air. Maisy watches from the edge of the cliff as Hobble falls to his doom before waving him goodbye.
What was this animation trying to say? Many people have proposed that behind the silly nature there were (as is true of all art) political messages hidden within which is not that hard to believe. Maisy says a lot about death in this cartoon, talking to Hobble (who heard wearing her hat could prevent death) about his foolishness and what a party death could be. She showed him dead oil barons, preachers, saints and more, many well known famous historical figures, they all slept beneath the earth. In the end of the animation Hobble would concede that Maisy had a point about all of this before going to live life and, hilariously, walking off a cliff.
Following this animation Ivan Hoth would pass on, leaving Lewis and Maisy behind. After Lewis left the company, Stencil Line would rapidly sanitize and reshape Maisy the Mutt into an “American Sweetheart” in the words of new Liquid Laff head Noris Tillman. It was an identity that Maisy as a character would not escape until the late 70’s.
Concept sketch for Death Marches On by Liquid Laff artist Curtis Brenner
Maisy and Hobble stand at the edge of a seemingly bottomless pit. Around them, ghosts swarm together covering the ground and walls of the pit as they fly towards the depths.
I sat in silence for a long, long time, watching myself become less of myself.