Mickey Mouse Comics

I'm currently studying Mickey Mouse to see if he ever actually had a personality. He certainly doesn't seem to in the cartoons.

I've heard people talk a LOT about the comics on Cartoon Brew, and sometimes it's referenced on John K's blog. So are the Mickey Mouse comics in comic book form or comic strip form? Are they online? Where do I go to read them?

Okay, I should be more organized.

1. When John K. or people on Cartoon Brew talk about Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comics, what exactly are they talking about? A comic book series? A newspaper comic strip?

2. Where do I go to read these comics? Are there in-print collections?

3. Are the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comics in the same strip/book or different ones?

Thanks. With your help I can finally figure out if Mickey ever truly had a personality. Studying the history of cartoons FTW! It's so worth crying myself to sleep every night thinking about how I have no life!

edited 6th Aug '11 2:54:16 AM by TacoWiz

The Mickey comics most people speak of are the old Floyd Gottfredson comic strips. They were serialized adventure stories that established Mickey as an adventurer and often an amateur detective and introduced characters such as Chief O'Hara, the Phantom Blot, Eega Beeva (a man from the future), and others generally set in the town of Mouseton, located near Duckburg.

Though Disney editorial forced Gottfredson to shift to Gag A Day by the 1950s, the legacy of Mickey's adventuring days would live on in proper comic books and other authors following in those footsteps. Though not as huge in the US now as he was before, Mickey does have a huge European following similar to Donald and Scrooge, but it's mostly focused in Italy, which has been the source of a lot of great storylines and specific series such as Wizards Of Mickey, X-Mickey (currently being translated into English for the Disney Comics iOS app) and the Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine which was a gritty detective story that starts with Mickey getting into trouble with the law as a result of them mixing his involvement in solving a ton of cases in Mouseton with actually being involved in perpetrating them.

Mickey, Donald and Scrooge comics generally have their own separate series, though Disney Comics and Stories generally prints stories about all three. There's a lot of collections out there, though there's such a mass of material out there that with the more popular authors in particular (Gottfredson, Carl Barks (the master of the Duck comics) and Don Rosa (huge Barks nut that wrote The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mc Duck and other stories tying into Barks) in particular) that Crack is Cheaper when it comes to collecting them. Fantagraphics is currently printing the Gottfredson and Barks stuff and Boom was starting on Rosa until their license expired.

edited 6th Aug '11 2:17:32 PM by FigmentJedi

Don't forget the comics in which Mickey and Goofy are secret agents in a world where everyone else is human, not dog-nosed humans, real humans, and their adventures included *people getting killed!* The artwork also had everything looking normal except Mick and Goof. It was like someone took a James Bond comic, erased Bond and drew Mickey instead. O_o I saw only a reprint in Spanish so I have no idea of where or when the original came from.

You can find just about all of the Mickey strips here, along with a ''whoooole' lot of other Disney comics. This is the same place where the linked scans for the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck here on TV Tropes comes from.

http://disneycomics.free.fr/index_dailies.php

edited 7th Aug '11 6:52:07 AM by kkhohoho

You know, now that Disney is acquiring Marvel Comics, that might affect comics starring Disney characters. Maybe they'll have a crossover event that puts Disney characters together with Marvel characters. Oh, yeah! That would be interesting, that's for sure!

Mickey and Donald had adventures with real human characters in Gottfredon's and Barks' works as well. Remember Robin Hood in "The Robin Hood adventure" or Yussuf Aiper in "Mickey joins the foreign legion" with Mickey, and "Dangerous Disguise" with Donald for instance. I also remember Gottfredson's stories from the 40's-50's where Mickey has frequent glances at sexy human chicks.

Somehow my house had a copy of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/WALT-DISNEYS-MICKEY-MOUSE-COLOR/dp/B000M0WAJW

Really good! The first battle between Mickey and the Phantom Blot (the real one, not that lump of ink from Epic Mickey), Mickey joining Robin Hood to save Maid Minerva (Minnie's medieval ancestor), and Mickey becoming a mail pilot to single-handedly defeat a pirate zeppelin!

Of course, these are 1930's comics, back when Mickey was allowed to have some spunk.

So Yeah, one of Walt's biggest mistakes was totally sanitizing Mickey. I'm still amused that this led directly to Donald being more popular just about everywhere.

There's a whole series of books in USA collecting Gottfredson's comics, the Floyd Gottfredson Library from Fantagraphics began back in 2011 and finished in 2018. There's also the Disney Masters collection series also from Fantagraphics started in 2018 and still going on. And then there's all the individual comic books, published from the 40's and while cancelled in USA, they're still published in many other countries over the world. Many of us in Europe grew up reading comics with Mickey rather than watch the cartoons, and in the comics he is often eager to go on adventures, and when he does he tends to take on multiple big foes, with the odds against him yet he wins with perseverance and cleverness. To say that Mickey lacks personality is, well, wrong.