After the demise of St. John's Publishing, the Comic Book Fans weren't treated to another Three Stooges series until 1959. As a part of a full-scale merchandising plan and because of the team's enormous popularity, Western Publishing was granted a licensing agreement by Norman Maurer Productions to publish a quarterly series of the Stooges Comics. These books were published by Western but distributed by Dell Publishing, which had the ability to get the comic books onto newstands and into the markets. Once the series was a proven success, Western went Bi-Monthly with their Stooges Comics. The issues revolved around the new adventures of Moe, Larry, and Curly-Joe, and the first issue was published in October of 1959.

Twelve cents was the new price tag on the Dell issues, and that bought two freshly written stories with the boys in each issue. The Stooges had a little more Fan exposure in the "Ask the Stooges" sections of the comics. Fans could ask the Stooges questions in hopes that the Stooges would answer back with their own wise advice or comments on the issue at hand.

The Dell editions were quite inferior to the Jubilee and St. John's issue in many ways. Perhaps their best asset was the Full Color Photographs of the Stooges hamming it up on the front cover of each issue. Some fans consider the covers priceless, more so than the comic strips inside. Stories were quite ridiculous and were often just silly play on words type humor. The customary slapstick that won the Stooges their claim to fame, wasn't as apparent in the Dell issues. This was in an attempt to tone down the Stooges' violence to appease unhappy parents.

 

Western employed their own artists and writers to do the the strips, and it definitely showed! Character drawings of the Stooges were inconsistent, ranging from fair to mediocre. Curly-Joe was as appealing as the Pillsbury Doughboy. Moe, actually came the closest to looking like himself, while larry looked like he had gone through a character change. His character had hair that was less frizzy, and his famous nose, had lost it's prominence.

Had Norman Maurer been supervising the series, artists would have done a much more credible job. The Western/Dell books just didn't have the same charisma as the earlier St. John's comics. The stories were poorly written, and the famous gags were filtered down to bad one-liners and lacked the luster of the famous Stooges Short films. Maybe the comic strips weren't as good because Norman Maurer wasn't doing them. After all, he had a closeness to the Stooges that none of these other artists could've had. He was not only related, but worked closely with the Stooges in every-day projects.

 

Western coninued to publish the Three Stooges series, producing a total of 10 issues plus a special Comic Album, under the Dell name. At this same time, they also came out with a Movie Series based on the feature film "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules". In 1962, Western decided to distribute their own books and use the name of Gold Key as their Logo and identity. Western/Gold Key went on to publish 45 issues over a period of 13 consecutive years.