Mike Mist!

A constant presence in the Ms. Tree stories was private eye Mike Mist. As it turns out Mike Mist was the reason Ms. Tree exists in the first place. 

Max Alkan Collins and Terry Beatty had teamed up on Mike Mist's Minute Myst-teries, a strip that appeared in various outlets in the 70's and early 80's. When organizing Eclipse Magazine, Jim Mullaney contacted the duo and put for the idea of them creating something for his very eclectic independent comic magazine. And so was born Ms. Tree, from the shadow of Mickey Spillane. As can be seen above in a sample, Mike Mist owes a bit to Dick Tracy. That's ironic since Collins would end up writing the venerated Chester Gould strip for many years. 

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The format was simple for the most part. Mist would be confronted with a mystery and within a mere five panels spot a discrepancy which pointed to the culprit. The reader was invited to go along on this fair-play mystery offering and discover how well their sleuthing skills were by flipping the comic upside down for the final panel reveal. 

Mike Mist became an important, if largely unseen presence in the Ms. Tree stories since he was often invoked as someone to take the overflow private eye work that went unattended while Ms. Tree was busy shooting and killing off members of the Meurte crime family and assorted others. 

In his team-ups with Ms. Tree, we get to see more of  Mist other than his uncanny observational skills. It's always a treat for me when he shows up in one of these stories. 

I think I've gathered up all of Mike Mist's cover appearances. If you look carefully at this upside-down cover by the great Adam Hughes you see a gaggle of gumshoes. There is Mike Mauser of E-Man fame for example. (Mauser is definitely showing up this year on the blog.) Which one is Mike? I think upside down is the way Mike might want to go out. 

And that concludes the Dojo's Ms. Tree coverage. Egg-spect something very different tomorrow. 

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