Abdul, also called Morty the Mesmerist, is a male anthropomorphic dog.
Description[]
Formerly a renowned hypnotist from Bazookistan, Abdul had, by 1949, fallen on hard times, slumming it in the Mouseton criminal underworld under the alias of "Morty the Mesmerist". He was hired by Peg-Leg Pete to embarrass Mickey Mouse and Goofy during a theatrical performance of Dante's Divine Comedy, but, having fallen asleep during the performance, only acted at the last moment; as Mickey and Goofy were leaving the theater, he cast a spell upon them to make them think they were truly the characters they had portrayed (Dante and Virgil, respectively). The spell further induced a trance state during which Mickey and Goofy had a shared dream of wandering through a childish parody of Dante's underworld, populated with familiar faces like Donald Duck or the Seven Dwarfs.
Behind the scenes[]
Abdul appeared in the opening segment of the 1949 story Mickey's Inferno.
The ending of the story sees the authors metafictionally mock the arbitrariness of this plot-device, which serves only to get the Dante parody started without suggesting that Mickey is "actually" traveling into Hell; Abdul is, for that matter, not brought back at the end, and his and Pete's scheme is thus one of the rare villainous schemes in Disney comics to go off without a hitch.
Abdul retained his name and foreign identification in the first English translation of Mickey's Inferno, that printed in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. The reprinting of the story as a hardcover by Papercutz, however, used an all-new localization which instead called him "Morty the Mesmerist", identified him as a frequent associate of Pete's rather than someone he had hired for this particular scheme, and dropped all mentions of Bazookistan. This version also added the detail that Abdul was only now casting his spell because he had fallen asleep during the play.