Mickey Mouse 304

Unlike Carl Barks, Disney’s other great comic book artist, relatively little of Floyd Gottfredson’s work is readily available. This makes the reprinting of two early works in this comic especially welcome.

Mickey Mouse has always been a strangely bland figure to be the figurehead on what’s undoubtedly the world’s most famous animation company. This creates a dilemma: how do you create an engaging newspaper strip out a character that’s little more than a cipher? For Gottfredson and his writers, the answer was to turn the series into a cheerful adventure romp, much as Barks would do with some of his Uncle Scrooge comics.

The plot of the main story here, ‘The Pirate Ghost Ship’, is based around an excursion made by Mickey and Pluto on a tuna fishing trip. After being hit by a typhoon, they’re shipwrecked, and are picked up by pirates (the main pirate resembling Peg-Leg Pete). This leads to that most archetypal of plot lines: a map, a secret island, and the quest for buried treasure.

Is it on the same level as Barks? No, it’s not. This is partially due to the restrictions of the daily newspaper format. There’s the need to provide a gag, or at least a narrative peak, every three or four panels. The storyline is inconsistent, particularly at the beginning, with the motives of the characters varying from scene to scene, often contradicting what’s gone before. The pirates want to kill Mickey. They want to befriend Mickey. No, hang on, they really do want to kill Mickey. As it progresses there are some terrific moments – Mickey and Pluto’s lives flashing before their eyes as they’re drowning, a scene where Mickey, Peg-Leg Pete and a sea monster all experience a broken sleep, worrying about each other.

The art though, is immaculate. It’s not flashy, but when examined, there’s not a wrong step throughout. This is especially impressive when you consider that it was working within the confines of the daily newspaper strip format. Gottfredson‘s art is all about narrative: progressing the story forward in the space of a few panels, communicating exactly what the characters are experiencing, with a few sight gags along the way.

There are problems with the art as presented here. It’s been reformatted to fit a comic book page, which means that the overall flow has been disrupted somewhat. And it’s presented in colour, whereas the strips were originally printed, and presumably designed for, black and white.

This same issue features an earlier Gottfredson strip, ‘Laundry Blues’. It’s a simple gag based affair, spanning two pages, but the style is less polished and, somehow, more appealing for that. Possibly because it bears less resemblance to the familiar Mickey Mouse as seen in innumerable cartoons, it has a freshness that the later work presented in this issue lacks.

The issue is rounded out by a more recent story, this time featuring Goofy. It’s also very good, with some amusing, if predictable, moments and highly polished art from Romana Scarpa.

The definitive collection of Gottfredson’s work is due from Fantagraphics later on this year, reprinting his Mickey Mouse strips in chronological order. Still, this issue serves as an interesting taster for that book, and it’s a welcome glimpse at the work one of the great comic strip artists.