Mickey Mouse (comic strip)

A Mickey Mouse comic strip was suggested by Joseph Connolly, the president of King Features Syndicate, in a July 24, 1929 letter to Disney animator Ub Iwerks: "I think your mouse animation is one of the funniest features I have ever seen in the movies. Please consider producing one in comic strip form for newspapers. If you can find time to do one, I shall be very interested in seeing some specimens." The Disney team was busy producing new cartoons, but by November, samples of the new strip were approved by the syndicate.[3] The comic strip launched on January 13, 1930,[1] written by Disney himself, with art by Ub Iwerks.

The strip begins with young Mickey as an optimistic, imaginative young mouse living on a farm, and dreaming of becoming a great aviator like his hero, Charles Lindbergh. In a sequence based on the 1928 short Plane Crazy, Mickey puts together a homemade plane, and takes a flight with his girlfriend Minnie. She falls out of the plane, and Mickey travels through a storm to land on a deserted island, inhabited by fierce natives who want to cook him alive.[4]

As these first strips were being released in January 1930, Iwerks left the Disney studio, signing a contract with Disney competitor Pat Powers to leave Disney and start an animation studio under his own name.[5] Win Smith, who had been inking the strips, took over the pencilling as well with the February 10th strip.[1] Smith left the studio in April after a fight with Disney, who wanted him to take over writing the strip. As a "temporary replacement", Disney asked a young inbetweener at the studio named Floyd Gottfredson to fill in. Gottfredson's first strip was published on May 5th, and he took over the scripting two weeks later. He would continue as the creative force of the strip for more than 45 years.[6]

While the early months of the strip did have a loose plot, the pace and style were still the standard gag-a-day approach to comic strips. With adventure and daily continuity strips like The Gumps and Wash Tubbs becoming increasingly popular, King Features Syndicate asked Disney to make Mickey Mouse a more serious adventure strip.

This led to the first adventure storyline, "Mickey Mouse in Death Valley", which ran from April 1 to September 20, 1930. The story -- begun by Smith, and continued by Gottfredson -- involves a crooked lawyer, Sylvester Shyster, and his thuggish associate Peg-Leg Pete, who kidnap Minnie in order to find a map to her Uncle Mortimer's hidden gold mine in Death Valley. Mickey and Minnie race Shyster and Pete to the desert, to lay claim to the mine. The story runs through a number of Western melodrama tropes -- a desperate horse chase, gunplay, a crusty old sheriff, the heroine getting locked up in a jail cell, the hero unfairly branded an outlaw. Over six months, Gottfredson made it clear that Mickey Mouse could deliver action and thrills.[7]

The next story, "Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers", included a sequence in which Mickey, convinced that Minnie has thrown him over for a rival, spends a week trying (and failing) to commit suicide. He tries shooting, gassing, drowning and hanging himself, before he decides that he's overreacting and gives up on the idea.[8]

In a 1931 publicity stunt, Mickey -- just crowned boxing champion in the strip -- had his photograph taken, and then encouraged readers to send a stamped, addressed envelope to him care of the newspaper to get a copy. Gottfredson painted a "photo" that was printed on cards and sent out to the readers. According to a Disney press release, they received more than 20,000 requests for the picture, demonstrating the strength of the strip's appeal.[9]

An early 1932 story, "The Great Orphanage Robbery", is seen as a milestone in Gottfredson's increasingly sophisticated storytelling. To raise money for an orphans' home, Mickey and friends stage a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but when the play is over, they discover that the money has been stolen. The thieves are Shyster and Pete, returning to the strip after a year and a half, but they manage to place the blame on Mickey's friend Horace Horsecollar, who's thrown in jail. Mickey chases after the villains, but his disappearance puts suspicion onto him as well.[10] In the second volume of the 2011 reprint collection, comics historian Thomas Andrae describes the resulting storyline:

Gottfredson's newfound mastery of the serial format is evident in nearly every strip of "Orphanage Robbery". First we are enticed into the story by following Mickey's attempt each day to increase the running total for the orphans' fund. Then the suspense increases through the use of an exciting chase -- conveniently supplied by [1932 Mickey short] The Klondike Kid -- as well as cross-cutting techniques developed from old movie serials, another influence Gottfredson now learned to mimic with ease. The strip cuts back and forth between the trial, conviction, and near-execution of Horace Horsecollar -- who is falsely accused of the theft -- and Mickey's progress in tracking down the villains.[11]

The first Sunday page appeared on January 10, 1932, and was aimed at a younger audience, as most Sunday comic strips were at the time.[6] In September 1932, Mrs. Fieldmouse saddled Mickey with baby-sitting her two pesky twins, Morty and Ferdie, who kept his house in an uproar for two months' worth of strips. They called him "Unca' Mickey", although they didn't seem to be actual relations, but when they returned in March 1935 for another Sunday continuity, they were indeed Mickey's nephews.[6]

Other memorable early-1930s storylines include 1932-33's "Blaggard Castle", in which Mickey and Horace are captured and hypnotized by the mad scientists Professor Ecks, Professor Doublex and Professor Triplex,[12] and 1933's "The Mail Pilot", where Mickey finds Shyster and Pete once again, ruling a secret zeppelin kingdom in the clouds.[13]

Mickey's best pal Goofy joined the strip in January 1933 -- still using the proto-Goofy moniker "Dippy Dawg"[14] -- and by the end of the year, he went into business with Mickey as detectives in "The Crazy Crime Wave", investigating the mysterious city-wide thefts of hair and red flannel underwear.[15] The character appeared in several stories as Dippy, until January 1936, when he's called "Goofy" for the first time in the strip.[16]

Donald Duck first appeared in the Sunday pages in February 1935, where he got Mickey involved in "The Case of the Missing Coats" and then stuck around to fight with Morty and Ferdie.[17] In March 1935's "Editor-in-Grief", the brash duck was hired as a newsboy, selling Mickey's crusading newspaper, The Daily War-Drum.[18] He returned to the strip in fall 1936 for "The Seven Ghosts", helping Mickey and Goofy investigate a haunted mansion.[19] This would be his last appearance in the Mickey Mouse strip -- starting in August 1936, Donald was the star of a year-long sequence in the Sunday Silly Symphony comic strip, and he got his own comic strip in 1938. Since Mickey and Donald could appear in rival newspapers, the characters weren't allowed to cross over to the other's strip.[20]

Another well-remembered 1930s story is Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot, published from May to September 1939.[21] In this story, Chief O'Hara hires Mickey to capture a new criminal who calls himself the Blot. According to O'Hara, he is the smartest thief they've ever met, but Detective Casey calls this new criminal a looney. The only thing he steals is cameras of a special type and he smashes them open on the spot. (The strange crime and the motive behind it resembles closely the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons".) The crime appears eccentric, but the villain is deadly serious -- three times during the story, he captures Mickey and leaves him in deadly peril, and the pair engage in a car chase, a boat chase and a battle for control of a crashing airplane. In the end, the Blot is captured and unmasked. The character was dubbed "the Phantom Blot" in 1941, when the strips were reprinted in Dell Comics' Four Color (1st series) issue #16, Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot.[22] The name stuck, and the character has been "the Phantom Blot" ever since.[6]

In the Sunday pages from August to November 1938, Mickey performed in an adaptation of the current short cartoon Brave Little Tailor, bookended with segments showing him as an actor, being cast in the film by Walt Disney.[23] This was Gottfredson's last work on the Sunday strip. At that point, Manuel Gonzales took over as the lead artist on the Mickey Sundays, and stayed in the post until 1981 (except for his military service during World War II, from 1942 to 1945). Gonzales and writer Merrill De Maris continued writing the occasional multi-week story, with an especially long four-month continuity from March to July 1940, "The Photographic Exhibition." The final Sunday story, "The Professor's Experiment", ran from November 1943 to March 1944. (This also happened to be the last appearance of Mickey's nephew Ferdie in the strip; from 1944 on, Ferdie's twin Morty always appeared alone.) At its peak the Sunday strip, "... appeared in 120 newspapers around the world with a collective circulation of more than 20 million readers each week."[24]

Gottfredson stopped plotting the strip in June 1943, passing it on to Disney press agent Bill Walsh, who wrote the strip for the next twenty years. Walsh's first two stories were about fighting the Axis; the second one, Mickey Mouse on a Secret Mission, enraged Adolf Hitler so much that he demanded Benito Mussolini stop Italians from publishing the Topolino (Mickey Mouse) comic magazine.[6]

Walsh had a taste for science-fiction, mystery and horror, and his stories quickly diverged from the previous decade's. In The 'Lectro Box (Oct 1943-Feb 1944), Mickey and nephew Morty create a powerful and unpredictable machine, which soon attracts the monstrous mad scientist Dr. Grut and his posse of mind-controlled Aberzombies. A few months later, Mickey, Minnie and Pluto visited The World of Tomorrow (July-Nov 1944), where Pegleg Pete ruled the world with his deadly robots, the Mekka Men. The next story, The House of Mystery (Nov 1944-Jan 1945), had the evil scientist Drusilla die in a fire as her mansion burns around her, and her caretaker rushes inside to be with her in the flames. At this point, the threat of death became a real presence in the strip.[6]

In mid-1945, the daily strip moved to a mostly gag-a-day format, with brief two-week continuities through the summer of 1947. In September 1947, the strip returned to long continuities and introduced a new character: Eega Beeva, "the Man of Tomorrow". [25] Eega was a strange creature from five hundred years in the future, a highly evolved human who understood future technology and possessed mysterious powers. He had a strange future accent that added a P to the beginning of most words: "I pdon't pthink so!" He was joined in February by his pet Pflip the Thnuckle-Booh, and became Mickey's sidekick for the next few years, returning to his home in the future in July 1950, at the end of "The Moook Treasure".[6]

On a Sunday page in October 1949, Goofy bought a talkative, self-centered mynah bird named Ellsworth, who was a major focus of the Sunday strip for ten years, sometimes crowding Mickey out of his own strip. Ellsworth also appeared in the daily strip in 1956, once the dailies became gag-focused as well.[26]

The daily strip took a darker turn in the early 1950s. Alberto Becattini says, "Especially after Eega Beeva left, Mickey found himself unwillingly mixed up in dangerous adventures whose development and outcome he no longer seemed to be able to control."[6] Goofy, who had been fairly absent from the daily strip during Eega Beeva's tenure, returned to the strip in March 1951 with "Dry Gulch Goofy", a story in which he becomes a Hollywood actor.[6]

In mid-1955, King Features Syndicate asked Gottfredson and Walsh to stop writing continuities and become a gag-a-day strip; they were concerned that TV serials were making the audience lose interest in adventure comic strips.[6] Walsh continued to write the daily strip until 1964.[1]

Notable supporting characters from the gag-a-day strip include Morty's friend Alvin (1956-75), his girlfriend Millie (1962-87), Doctor Proctor (1966-89), and Goofy's girlfriend Glory-Bee (1969-79), who also appeared in Disney comic books in the early 70s.[6]

The headings in the table below refer to the Fantagraphics Books reprint collections, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse.

In 1990, writer Floyd Norman convinced King Features Syndicate to allow him to bring back the comic strip's adventure story format.[37] Norman and Colette Bezio shared the scripting, with Rick Hoover, Alex Howell and Thomas Lewis providing art. The 1990-1995 stories have not been reprinted in the US, and only rarely in other countries.

List of storylines:[53]

The two volumes of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse reprint the Sunday pages that Gottfredson worked on. Following the Brave Little Tailor adaptation in 1938, Manuel Gonzales took over as artist for the Sunday pages until 1942, when it passed to Bill Wright. There were seven more Sunday storylines under Gonzales and Wright's tenure:

• "The Society Dog Show" (January 15-22, 1939), written by Merrill De Maris, pencil by Manuel Gonzales, inks by Ted Thwaites[54]
• "The Photographic Expedition" (March 17-July 14, 1940), written by Merrill De Maris, pencil by Manuel Gonzales, inks by Ted Thwaites[55]
• "Purty Clever" (Jan 19-Feb 16, 1941), written by Merrill De Maris, pencil and inks by Manuel Gonzales[56]
• "Goofy Gets Smart" (May 18-June 22, 1941), written by Merrill De Maris, pencil and inks by Manuel Gonzales[57]
• "Lucky Mickey" (aka No Charge!) (Sept 7-21, 1941), written by Merrill De Maris, pencil and inks by Manuel Gonzales[58]
• no title (Sept 19-Nov 14, 1943), written by Hubie Karp, pencil and inks by Bill Wright[59]
• "The Professor's Experiment" (Nov 21, 1943-March 12, 1944), written by Hubie Karp, pencil and inks by Bill Wright[60]

Following "The Professor's Experiment", the Sunday strip shifted completely to the gag-a-week format.[39]

In the 1930s and 40s, Western Publishing published a very popular series of small hardcover books for children known as Big Little Books. These chunky, compact books featured a captioned illustration on one page, with a page of text on the facing page. The stories featured a wide assortment of popular characters, including a number of Disney stars, and Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse strips provided the perfect material for an illustrated adventure story.

The following Big Little Books were published based on Mickey Mouse storylines:[62]

There was also a set of six "Wee Little Books" published in 1934 -- smaller books released in a special box set that told the story of Mickey Mouse and His Horse Tanglefoot. The six titles are Mickey Mouse at the Carnival, Mickey Mouse's Misfortune, Mickey Mouse and Tanglefoot, Mickey Mouse's Uphill Fight, Mickey Mouse Will Not Quit and Mickey Mouse Wins the Race.[63]

Gottfredson's Mickey strips were often collected in the 1930s and 1940s. The monthly Mickey Mouse Magazine began reprinting Mickey Mouse strips in issue #16 (January 1937), which continued after the magazine evolved into Dell Publishing's Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in 1940. The title continued reprinting Mickey Mouse through 1948.[6]

Modern-day American reprints began with "The Bar None Ranch" (1940) which appeared in Walt Disney Comics Digest #40 (1973).[64] The following year "The Bat Bandit" (1934) appeared in a deluxe edition The Best of Walt Disney Comics.[65] Abbeville Press' large size Best Comics anthologies in the late-1970s included two all-Gottfredson volumes (one headlined "Goofy"), though the stories were relettered and sometimes condensed. In 1980, Abbeville issued a small-size Best Comics series that included three all-Gottfredson volumes (again, one headlined "Goofy"), all of which reprinted stories from the earlier large-size editions.

In 1986, Another Rainbow/Gladstone Publishing (and later Gemstone Publishing) began a tradition of serializing Gottfredson stories in regular Disney monthly comic books, which continued on and off until 2008, when they ceased publication. Gladstone also collected a number of Gottfredson's serials in the larger-size "comic albums" it issued during the 1980s;[66], in 1990, Disney Comics issued "Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot" (1939) in the same format.[67]

In 1988 a selection of both the daily and Sunday strip were published by Another Rainbow Publishing in the book Mickey Mouse in Color.

In 2006, Gemstone Publishing published a colored and reformatted version of the story "Mickey Mouse Music" for the Walt Disney Treasures collection Disney Comics: 75 Years of Innovation. Gemstone Publishing announced The Floyd Gottfredson Library, a comprehensive edition of Gottfredson's serialized stories (Mickey 1930-1955, plus later non-Mickey material) with a planned release during 2009. But the series was postponed, then canceled once Gemstone no longer had the Disney license.

In 2011, Fantagraphics Books resumed production of the series Gemstone had started, with the same editorial team but with the individual books branded "Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse." The Floyd Gottfredson Library series title appeared on the indicia pages inside the books.

Fantagraphics' Gottfredson Library came into print in 2011 and its publishing run lasted until 2018; in total 14 volumes were released, collecting the Gottfredson Mickey Mouse daily strips originally published from 1930-1955 as well as the various works Gottfredson did for the Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales Sunday strips.[68]

On November 21, 2018, Fantagraphics followed the Gottfredson Library with a one-shot anthology book to celebrate Mickey Mouse's 90th anniversary, titled Mickey Mouse: The Greatest Adventures, ISBN:978-1-68396-122-2. This book featured black-and-white daily strips newly arranged and printed in full color, in a 300-page "best-of" selection that included "Mickey Mouse in Death Valley" and "The Gleam" among others.[69][70]