What About Thad?

Via Jaime Weinman, I caught the news announced at Comic-Con (I tend to avoid any and all news associated with the place involuntarily) that Fantagraphics is planning to print the entire run of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse daily continuities. That’s a beautiful thought, but they may be ultimately promising more than they can deliver. (We’re still waiting on those Pogo books.)

There’s a lot of dilemmas in reprinting a library set devoted to Gottfredson, which is why there hasn’t been a steady supply of them reprinted in America since Bruce Hamilton had the Disney license in the 1980s (before he went insane). It wasn’t for a lack of trying, as Gary Groth may be implying with his backhanded dig at Gemstone. Firstly, as addressed by Groth, a complete collection would include some genuinely racist material. There’s no dodging or spinning the issue. Most of the black characters are presented as dumber and uglier than dogshit in Gottfredson’s world, and, for a change, I completely sympathize with Disney’s nervousness about printing the more notorious stories.

Secondly, the sources for the strips will need to be seriously cleaned up for modern printing. Bad printing has ruined many a great Disney story in the past. I sincerely hope they take the necessary time to do justice to Gottfredson’s work.

Thirdly, and yes, objectively, most of the continuities after 1950 are very forgettable, which may be why Groth misremembered that 1955 was the last time a continuing storyline was used in the dailies. That doesn’t mean they will sell bad. On the contrary, they could sell wonderful, as save one 1952 continuity, none of the 1950s stories have been reprinted in the United States. The mileage on these stories will vary depending on the individual’s tolerance of hackneyed writing and drawing.

Fourth, final, and foremost, we’re talking about the Disney Corporation here. There will be guaranteed bottlenecks in the production. Some high-up won’t like how Mickey addresses Minnie in one story, or doesn’t like the brutality of Pete in another, or doesn’t like the cleavage showing on a femme fatale, and ask for changes, even though the number of minors actually buying the books will be in the single digits. Stuff won’t move, more delays will occur, and we might actually see Pogo Volume 1 before Mickey Volume 1.

It would really be wonderful to have all of these things in a nice bound volume (ala Barks, Kurtzman, Martin, etc.), but I wouldn’t hold your breath on anything positive having to do with the Wonderful World of Disney getting accomplished. I would like more than anything to be proven wrong, as Floyd Gottfredson was one of the most gifted of all 20th century storytellers, and a complete collection of his work is badly needed.

Here we have a Fox & Crow story drawn by Jim Davis that eerily predates modern dietary methods. This one gets extremely far-out, even for this series, with its gratuitous morbid obesity, cannibalism, and heads naturally made of iron. I’ve spent some time reacquainting myself with these guys lately, and most of the ones from roughly 1948-54 still hold up as the best funny animal comics DC published.

Taken from The Fox and Crow #18 (Aug. 1954).

There was a lot of talk about Milt Gross press not too long ago with the release of Craig Yoe’s The Complete[sic] Milt Gross. I didn’t pay much attention because I’m not the biggest fan of Gross. His writing is leagues ahead of his comic contemporaries, but the art makes me feel claustrophobic if I look at it too long.

All the talk though reminded me that Gross designed the titles for Roxie Hart, Fox’s tacky 1942 remake of Chicago with Ginger Rogers, and that I actually had a copy of the movie. So here are those titles for your enjoyment. Gross was an inspired choice to do them because he sums up the tone of the film nicely.

This has been going on for awhile, so it isn’t really news, but Barnes & Noble has taken a temporary leave of sanity and is blowing out the The Completely MAD Don Martin at $22.48. This is not a joke… None of this “members only” business either… I know because this deal is how I got mine. Additionally, it’s available at a special “Buy 2, Get 3rd Free” deal, so you can take care of all your holiday shopping done at once.

I had heard of this parody from Dark Horse’s Hellboy Jr. #2 (Nov. 1999) in passing but have never seen it until now. Story and color by Bill Wray, art by Stephen DeStefano. It’s a little hardcore (as well as outrageously funny), so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

(Thanks, Kevin!)

I love a lot of comics from the 1940s and 1950s, and own about a thousand of them, but they simply don’t hold up well for rereading. The art can be great to look at (and help ID certain animators’ styles in many cases), but the stories are mostly junk, and repetitive junk at that. Carl Barks, John Stanley, and Walt Kelly are the transgressive artists at Western Publishing, period.

I think this story from WDC&S 173 (Feb. 1955) is probably in my top five favorites; of course I say that about every Barks story I reread and laugh out loud at. At around this time, people were not fond of Barks’s depiction of Donald, writing to him, saying that his behavior upset their children. I don’t have a copy of the letter, but I think Barks responded to one of them saying something to the extent of “tell your kid he’s a nose pickin’ crybaby.”

My apologies for those who hate modern coloring, it’s all I have of the story on file.

If anyone is left around to care, Mickey doesn’t die. I hope you’ve enjoyed this serial!

Apologies for keeping you all in suspense, but at least you aren’t waiting months like all those poor readers in 1936 did!! This probably contains my favorite bit of dialog from Pete in the whole strip’s history: “I’m sure glad I hate yuh! Cause if I didn’t hate yuh, I’d like yuh! An’ I don’t WANNA like yuh – I hate yuh too much!” We need that on bumper stickers.

Echoing Frank’s system, I’ll save commentary for after the strips to prevent spoilers. As the strips originally appeared from April 27th to June 6th, 1936.

Mickey shows off some real acting skills here never seen in the films. In a bit of self-parody, he plays a naive, “goshing” hick to get in Trigger’s good books and trail him without sacrificing his position. Gottfredson also portrays Mickey as a great observer of human behavior, almost echoing the great detective flicks that filled many a matinee in this era. As previously stated, the Gottfredson mouse delivered just about everything the screen mouse did not.

As Mickey’s adventure continues, he is reacquainted with the most colorful of all Disney villains, Peg-Leg Pete. Though usually more fleshed-out as a character than the ones he oppresses onscreen, the animated Pete’s nasty charm was primarily carried by the brilliant performance of Billy Bletcher. Remembered for bullying Mickey onscreen, the thuggish cat was at his best terrorizing Donald in notable shorts like Timber, Trombone Trouble, and The New Neighbor.

Pete in this story does not fit the typical weenie/Disney villain criteria. He is not merely a domineering bully, but a true sadist. Make no mistake of the undertones in the lengthy section where Pete subjects Mickey to torturous ‘duties’. While it is a diabolically delicious way to get Mickey off of his and Trigger’s trails, this is payback for all of the previous cat-and-mouse battles they’ve had previously. The bodily harm (fairly graphically depicted in the art) is simply not enough for this monster. Pete knows that Mickey is aware of what he’s doing, and takes savage pleasure in seeing Mickey refusing to jeopardize his mission in any way, bearing the shame the whole time.

Before it folded, Gemstone Publishing printed a slightly altered version of the May 7th strip, where the African cops are redrawn as dogs (probably by Daan Jippes, the only person alive who can draw in the style of any Disney cartoonist perfectly, not to mention having an amazing style all his own). Probably the biggest bone of contentions with printing the Gottfredson dailies are these antiquated racial caricatures, littered here and there throughout the strip’s history. While the stereotypes are merely incidental here, certain other stories, notably In Search of Jungle Treasure and The Plumber’s Helper, go far beyond the typical ‘darkie’ types and give us an unfortunate insight into Gottfredson’s prejudices. This is not to play a game of pointing fingers or put Gottfredson down in anyway, but it is an unavoidable issue when studying the richest portions of the man’s oeuvre.

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Relevant to the discussion of Disney storytelling, I see that my colleague David Gerstein, inbetween telling Scrooge McDuck what to do in Norwegian and sending whiny texts to Tom S. and I about the crying babies on the plane with him, has had another back-and-forth over the use of written prose during the Disney studio’s golden age. If you can read the whole thing, David is, naturally, right and amazingly patient in his dialog with a blatant fraud, supporting his protection of history with his many months of painstaking research. When you are done reading, don’t forget to click the PayPal button on the right and deposit some funds to support my own archive/porn bill. See youse.

In trying to get a buzz going about him again, I’ll be posting my favorite of all the Mickey Mouse serials by Floyd Gottfredson, Mickey Mouse Joins the Foreign Legion.

By and large, handsome and charming drawing/movement was about all the animated Mickey Mouse had in its favor. Animation by masters Fred Moore, Bill Tytla, Les Clark, and Ken Muse of the character will always remain useful in analyzing bygone principles of the art form. But the character itself never had much in the way of personality. The early black-and-white shorts borrow from Otto Messmer’s mischievous Felix, with none of the imagination; the color Mickey regressed into a framing device for funnier and more interesting characters. This is why the mouse is, really, a bit of a failure as a star of animated comedy shorts. Mickey Mouse just isn’t funny.

This is the problem Floyd Gottfredson had to get around when handling Mickey on a day-to-day basis: how to make this rodent interesting. The decision to make the strip a serio-comedy strip like Segar’s Popeye was one that allowed this major retooling of the character to happen. Gottfredson used the charm of the character as basic groundwork, mixing in senses of bravery, loyalty, and resourcefulness that the animated mouse never had. Whereas the movie mouse had fake charisma that audiences to this day still eat up, the printed mouse’s was genuine.

Walt Disney himself helped Gottfredson put these seeds in place in the important 1930 Death Valley story (along with introducing lawyer character Sylvester Shyster the Crooked Jew, a creation of Walt’s own hand), but the strip would degenerate into gag stories soon enough. 1932 was the year Gottfredson came into his own with the epic MM Sails for Treasure Island and Blaggard Castle, combining a righteous helping each of drama, pathos, and humor to make the Mickey Mouse daily strip a milestone in comic history.

At the time of this strip, 1936, Gottfredson was at his zenith as a storyteller and artist, and had not only developed Mickey into a formidable hybrid of Andy Hardy and Errol Flynn, but also accomplished the unthinkable: he made Minnie interesting too. No longer was she just a framing device, but a strong woman who stands by her man and can take the dangers that come with it (unlike the overbearing bitch Daisy Duck was in Carl Barks’s world). Unfortunately, Foreign Legion is not the best example of this, though I would recommend seeking out 1934’s Captive Castaways, or 1938’s Monarch of Medioka, both of which showcase the rarity of feminine funny animal ingenuity.

Here is the first installment of the story, as it appeared in newspapers from March 23rd to April 25th, 1936. Inking by Ted Thwaites, and scripting by Ted Osborne.