Merrill De Maris (February 26, 1898 — December 31, 1948) was a comic writer.
Career[]
Merrill De Maris was a prolific writer for King Features Syndicate's American Disney comic strips, including the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies script. Starting with 1933's The Crazy Crime Wave, he regularly provided Floyd Gottfredson with scripts for the Mickey Mouse adventures strip, occasionally on the basis of a synopsis suggested by Gottfredson himself.
He left Disney in 1942 for health reasons before dying in 1948 at the age of 50; barring later remakes of his Mickey stories which reused his scripts, his last published Disney work was his sole collaboration with Carl Barks, the Donald Duck story Too Many Pets, which was published in 1943, having resulted from Barks being told to rework an unfinished Mickey synopsis of De Maris's into a Donald comic book story.
Over his nine years, De Maris had the distinction of cocreating the Phantom Blot, Chief O'Hara and Detective Casey in the seminal Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot as well as confirming Minnie Mouse's birth name to be “Minerva” in 1942's The Gleam.