Millie The Lovable Monster issue 2 (1962) interior page

I'm a lifelong fan of Bill Woggon's art, especially on his signature creation Katy Keene (1946-1961).  Not long after Mr. Woggon's long tenure at Archie Comics was over in 1961, he drew "Millie The Lovable Monster," a very strange fantasy/comedy comic book for Dell Comics.  Millie (the Dell monster, not the Marvel Comics model) was a benign fire breathing dragon with a pet tiger who moved into a haunted house in a pleasant small town.  Somehow, the comic only lasted three issues with new material.  A few years after its cancellation, the three issues were reprinted in their entirety, so there were in total six issues of Millie The Lovable Monster.  Though I'll always associate Mr. Woggon's work with the high fashion glamorous world of beautiful starlet Katy Keene, I still see a lot to admire in Mr. Woggon's art in Millie The Lovable Monster.  His approach to drawing friendly and unfriendly ghosts, nightmare trees with faces, haunted houses, and a domesticated dragon would have fit in well with another comic company, Harvey Comics, and I wonder why he didn't shift over to drawing Casper, Hot Stuff, Wendy the Good Little Witch, Stumbo, etc , whose comics were in high gear in the early 1960s.

After Millie TLM, Mr. Woggon created Dazey's Diary, about a pretty gal who led an adventurous life, but that turned out to be a one-shot.  Mr. Woggon left comics for a couple of decades, worked in the advertising industry, and returned to comics in 1985, coming full circle in chronicling, along with Katy fan turned comic artist Barb Rausch, the adventures of another fashionista, Vicki Valentine, and her family and friends, with more paper dolls than you could shake a stick at in the four issue run of Vicki Valentine's comic.

But back to Millie The Lovable Monster -- I'm glad to have this sample of art from the short-lived series, even without an appearance on the page by the titular dragon.  The large panel with the flying ghosts was a main draw for me.