Mickey Mouse (comic strip)
Mickey Mouse is an American newspaper comic strip by the Walt Disney Company featuring Mickey Mouse and is the first published example of Disney comics. The strip debuted on January 13, 1930, and ran until July 29, 1995. It was syndicated by King Features Syndicate until 1990, when Disney switched to Creators Syndicate, which distributed the strip until 2014.
The early installments were written by Walt Disney, with art by Ub Iwerks and Win Smith. Beginning with the May 5, 1930, strip, 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 US, as well as papers in twenty other countries. Starting in 1940, strips were reprinted in the monthly comic book Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, and since then Gottfredson reprints have become a staple of Disney comics publishing around the world.
Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, a definitive collection of Gottfredson's work, was published by Fantagraphics Books from 2011 to 2018. There are fourteen volumes in the set—twelve books of [|the daily strips] from 1930 to 1955, and two volumes of Gottfredson's [|Sunday pages] from 1932 to 1938.
Development
Early days
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. The comic strip launched on January 13, 1930, 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.
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. Win Smith, who had been inking the strips, took over the pencilling as well with the February 10th strip. 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 5, and he took over the scripting two weeks later. He would continue as the creative force of the strip for more than 45 years.
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.
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 attempting suicide. He tries shooting, gassing, drowning and hanging himself, before he decides that he's overreacting and gives up on the idea.
1930s
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.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. In the second volume of the 2011 reprint collection, comics historian Thomas Andrae describes the resulting storyline:
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. 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.
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, and 1933's "The Mail Pilot", where Mickey finds Shyster and Pete once again, ruling a secret zeppelin kingdom in the clouds.
Mickey's best pal Goofy joined the strip in January 1933—still using the proto-Goofy moniker "Dippy Dawg"—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. The character appeared in several stories as Dippy, until January 1936, when he's called "Goofy" for the first time in the strip.
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. In March 1935's "Editor-in-Grief", the brash duck was hired as a newsboy, selling Mickey's crusading newspaper, The Daily War-Drum. He returned to the strip in fall 1936 for "The Seven Ghosts", helping Mickey and Goofy investigate a haunted mansion. 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.
Another well-remembered 1930s story is Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot, published from May to September 1939. 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 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 issue #16, Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot. The name stuck, and the character has been the Phantom Blot ever since.
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. 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. 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. 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."
1940s
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 comic magazine.As Walsh was not interested in Mickey Mouse as a character, and had a taste for science-fiction, mystery and horror, his stories quickly diverged from those of the previous decade. Walsh created various bizarre characters and made Mickey's antagonists darker and deadlier. In The 'Lectro Box, 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, where Pegleg Pete ruled the world with his deadly robots, the Mekka Men. The next story, The House of Mystery, 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.
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".
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".
On a Sunday page in October 1949, Goofy bought a talkative, self-centered mynah bird named Ellsworth. Also created by Walsh, Ellsworth was a major focus of the Sunday strip for ten years, sometimes crowding Mickey out of his own strip. He also appeared in the daily strip in 1956, once the dailies became gag-focused as well.