Carroll O. Wessler (May 25, 1913 – April 9, 1989), better known as Carl Wessler, was an American animator of the 1930s and a comic book writer from the 1940s though the 1980s for such companies as DC Comics, EC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Warren Publishing. Wessler was one of at least five staff writers (officially titled editors) under editor-in-chief Stan Lee at Marvel's 1950s forerunner, Atlas Comics. Biography Early life and career Wessler began as an animator in the 1930s, working on Musical Memories and other theatrical cartoon shorts for the Fleischer Studios in New York City. The studio fired him on March 30, 1937, for labor union organizing; after a subsequent strike by studio staff, lasting from May 7 to October 13 of that year, the studio settled, and Wessler and others were rehired. Wessler followed Fleischer when it relocated to Florida the following year. While continuing to work as an animator, Wessler began doing freelance art for comic books in 1943, through the studio Sangor-Hughes, a packager that produced outsourced comics for publishers entering the then-new medium. Wessler returned to New York when Fleischer relocated as Famous Studios, and he segued full-time into comics during this 1940s period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. Due to much of his work going unsigned, in the manner of the times, comprehensive credits are difficult to ascertain; Wessler's earliest confirmed credits are as a cartoonist writing and drawing such talking animal features as "Snazzy Rabbit" and "Senorita Juanita McMouse" in Croydon Publishing/Rural Home Publishing's Laffy-Daffy Comics #1 (Feb. 1945). He also wrote and drew the humorous feature "Happy Daze" in at least two issues of Lev Gleason Publications' Daredevil in 1951. Atlas and EC Wessler began writing for Atlas Comics in November 1950 with the six-page story "The Mad Monk" about the historical figure Grigori Rasputin, published in Amazing Detective Cases #6 (May 1951). He soon became Atlas' primary crime fiction writer, often scripting entire issues of All-True Crime, Amazing Detective Cases, Crime Can't Win, Crime Exposed, Crime Must Lose, Justice, and Kent Blake of the Secret Service. Going on staff in 1952, he became a member of the Atlas bullpen with fellow writers Hank Chapman, Ernie Hart, Paul S. Newman, Don Rico and, on teen-humor comics, future Mad cartoonist Al Jaffee. Wessler wrote horror/fantasy stories for such titles as Adventures into Terror, Adventures into Weird