Disney comics


Disney comics are comic books and comic strips featuring characters created by the Walt Disney Company, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Scrooge McDuck and José Carioca.
The first Disney comics were newspaper strips appearing from 1930 on, starting with the Mickey Mouse comic strip. Mickey Mouse Magazine, the first American newsstand publication with Disney comics, launched in 1935. In 1940, Western Publishing launched the long-running flagship comic book, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, which reached 750 issues in September 2019. Uncle Scrooge, launched in 1952, reached issue #450 in June 2019. In recent decades, Disney comics have seen a decline of popularity in the United States. In the rest of the world Disney comics have remained very successful, especially in Europe, where weekly Disney comics magazines and monthly paperback digests are national best sellers.
Disney comics have been the basis for academic theory, cultural criticism, and fan-created databases.

U.S. comic strips

The first Disney comics appeared in daily newspapers, syndicated by King Features with production done in-house by a Disney comic strip department at the studio. Initially Floyd Gottfredson along with his responsibilities for the Mickey Mouse comic strip oversaw the Disney comic strip department from 1930 to 1945, then Frank Reilly was brought in to administer the burgeoning department from January 1946 to 1975. Greg Crosby headed the department from 1979 to 1989.

Mickey Mouse

The Mickey Mouse daily comic strip began on January 13, 1930, featuring Mickey as an optimistic, adventure-seeking young mouse. It was initially written by Walt Disney with art by Ub Iwerks and. Beginning with the May 5, 1930, installment the art chores were taken up by Floyd Gottfredson, who also either wrote or supervised the story continuities. Gottfredson continued with the strip until 1975. By 1931, the Mickey Mouse strip was published in 60 newspapers in the United States, as well as papers in twenty other countries.
From the beginning, the strips were parts of long continuing stories. These introduced characters such as the Phantom Blot, Eega Beeva, and the Bat Bandit, which Gottfredson created; Disney created Eli Squinch, Mickey's nephews, Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse, and Sylvester Shyster, which were also introduced in the comic.
Starting in the 1950s, Gottfredson and writer Bill Walsh were instructed to drop the storylines and do only daily gags. Gottfredson continued illustrating the daily strip until he retired on October 1, 1975.
After Gottfredson retired, the strip was written and drawn by many other creators. The Sunday page went into reprints in February 1992, and the daily strip ended on July 29, 1995.
In 2011, Fantagraphics Books began the Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse series, a hardback collection of Gottfredson's run on the strip. A total of 14 volumes were published between 2011 and 2018, collecting the entirety of Gottfredson's Sunday color work and all of his serialized story-themed daily strips. The collection doesn't include any of Gottfredson's gag-oriented material from 1955 onwards.

Silly Symphony

The Mickey Mouse Sunday strip started on January 10, 1932, with a topper Silly Symphony strip.Silly Symphony initially related the adventures of Bucky Bug, the first Disney character to originate in the comics. It went on to print more adaptations of Silly Symphony shorts, often using the characters and setting of the original shorts, but adding new plotlines and incidents. It also went on to print adaptations of the feature films, as well as periods of gag strips featuring Donald Duck and Pluto. By late 1935 the strip was a standalone half-page, not strictly a topper for the Mickey Sunday.
The strip was initially titled Silly Symphonies; after two years, the name was changed to Silly Symphony. The switch happened in the February 18, 1934, strip, just three weeks before Bucky Bug would be replaced with a new storyline, "Birds of a Feather".
The complete rundown of Silly Symphony strips, from 1932 to 1945:
The Silly Symphony Sunday strip ended on October 7, 1945, and was replaced by Uncle Remus and His Tales of Br'er Rabbit.
Three of the Silly Symphony stories inspired long-running features in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. Original Bucky Bug stories first appeared in issue #39 and appeared every month for seven years, wrapping up with issue #120. "The Three Little Pigs" feature inspired the creation of Li'l Bad Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf's errant son, who wants to be friends with the Pigs. Li'l Bad Wolf's adventures began in issue #52, and he made regular appearances until almost the end of the comic's original run, issue #259. Finally, Little Hiawatha had his own monthly story for two years, from issue #143 to #168.
The complete strip has been reprinted in four hardcover collections, Silly Symphonies: The Complete Disney Classics, published by IDW Publishing's Library of American Comics imprint. The first volume, published in 2016, includes all of the strips from "Bucky Bug" to "Cookieland". Volume 2, published in 2017, includes "Three Little Kittens" to "Timid Elmer". Volume 3, published in 2018, includes "Pluto the Pup" to "Little Hiawatha". The fourth volume, published in 2019, concludes the series with "Bambi" through Panchito".

Donald Duck

made his first comics appearance in the Silly Symphony adaptation of the 1934 Disney short The Wise Little Hen. As Donald's popularity grew, he became the star of the Silly Symphony strip for an extended run, and then got his own daily strip starting on February 7, 1938. A Donald Sunday strip premiered December 10, 1939. Carl Barks, known to fans as "The Duck Man," wrote at least 20 of the strips between 1938 and 1940. Donald Duck ran until May 2005, when it went into reprints.
Starting in 2015, IDW Publishing's Library of American Comics imprint has been publishing hardcover collections of the Donald Duck strip. As of 2019, five volumes of Donald Duck: The Complete Daily Newspaper Comics and two volumes of Donald Duck: The Complete Sunday Comics have been released.

Uncle Remus and His Tales of Br'er Rabbit

Uncle Remus and His Tales of Br'er Rabbit was launched as a Sunday strip on October 14, 1945, as a preview of the upcoming 1946 film Song of the South. The Uncle Remus strip began, like Silly Symphony, as a topper for the Mickey Mouse strip, but after the first few years, almost always appeared on its own.
The previous comic strip adaptations of Disney films lasted for four or five months, but the Uncle Remus strip continued for almost thirty years, telling new stories of Br'er Rabbit and friends, until the strip was discontinued on December 31, 1972.

Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales

In 1950, Disney distributed a limited-time Sunday strip adaptations of their new animated feature Cinderella, and followed the next year with Alice in Wonderland. Judged a success, the experiment was turned into an ongoing feature in 1952—Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales—beginning with The Story of Robin Hood.
The Sunday strip ran for thirty-five years, from July 13, 1952, to February 15, 1987. The animated features adapted for the strip include Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book. Classic Tales also featured animated shorts, including Lambert the Sheepish Lion and Ben and Me, and featurettes like Peter & The Wolf and Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. The 1979-80 adaptation of The Black Hole was particularly notable for featuring pencil art by comics icon Jack Kirby, with Mike Royer inking.
Treasury of Classic Tales also adapted live-action films like Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson, Mary Poppins and The Love Bug. The strip transitioned from historical dramas like The Sword and the Rose and Kidnapped to comedies like The Shaggy Dog and The Parent Trap.
In 2016, IDW Publishing and their imprint The Library of American Comics began to collect all the Treasury of Classic Tales stories in a definitive hardcover reprint series. As of 2019, three volumes have been published, reprinting all the stories from Robin Hood through In Search of the Castaways. In April 2018, it was announced that, due to the sales goal of the series not being met, the third volume may be the last one to be published.

Scamp

In 1955, the animated film Lady and the Tramp inspired a new comic strip based on an adorable, unnamed puppy glimpsed at the end of the movie. Scamp debuted in newspapers on October 31, 1955, and ran for more than 30 years, ending on June 25, 1988. The strip was created by Ward Greene, a King Features Syndicate editor who wrote the original magazine story, Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog, and Miss Patsy, the Beautiful Spaniel, which inspired the film. Greene and artist Dick Moores produced the strip for eight months as a continuing story. Starting in May 1956, other creators took over, and the strip moved to a gag-a-day format.