Miki Ma’oz (Mickey Mouse) – The First Comic Magazine in the Land of Israel – Issue No. 1 and Issue No. 2, Tel Aviv, 1947. An illustrated children’s magazine featuring various comic stories based on “Mickey Mouse” [Miki Ma’oz], “Pinocchio, ” and “Donald Duck” [Dani Oznei] by Walt Disney. These are among the earliest comic book publications released in the Land of Israel.
Miki Ma’oz is the first comic magazine in the Land of Israel, published in Tel Aviv in 1947. The magazine was bi-weekly and contained several comic storylines written and illustrated by Yaakov Miber – a writer and poet known for writing short stories for children, and Emanuel Yaffe, an illustrator, composer, and children’s author, about characters from Walt Disney, including Mickey Mouse, whose name was translated to “Miki Ma’oz, ” after which the magazine was named. The magazine published stories for children starring Disney characters and was published continuously from 1947 to 1948. It closed after 9 issues. Just over a month after the release of the first issue, the magazine collapsed financially (mainly due to the high cost of color printing) and was forgotten.
Miber and Yaffe wrote several stories about characters from Walt Disney, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Pinocchio. Publishing these stories was completely illegal, as using the characters without Walt Disney’s permission was a serious violation of copyright law. To avoid legal action, the illustrator Emanuel Yaffe made sure not to draw Mickey Ma’oz as the exact mouse, but as a strikingly similar mouse from a competing company, thus avoiding a lawsuit from Walt Disney, though the competing company was less well-known. Regardless, in 1947’s Land of Israel, legal processes were still in their infancy, and it is doubtful that anyone at Walt Disney even knew about the existence of the magazine.
Although the stories in the magazine dealt with foreign characters, their names were translated into Hebrew, leading to the name of the magazine, “Miki Ma’oz” for Mickey Mouse. Additionally, Donald Duck was translated to “Dani Oznei.” The magazine was the first children’s publication in the Land of Israel to be printed in color, and indeed, the entire magazine was printed in color. One of the publishers of the magazine was Yehoshua Ten-Pe, who briefly served as the publisher before returning to work at Haaretz.
Condition of both issues: Very good.
