Book 75-77: Disney comics

Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes by Carl Barks (A-)
Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley (A-)
Mickey Mouse: Trapped on Treasure Island by Floyd Gottfredson (A)

(A little late for 2011, but it's my blog)

Let's talk about characters. Easily the best thing (for me, as a Disney geek) about these hardbound reprints of old comics and comic strips is that getting to see Donald and Mickey (among other characters) as more developed than they tended to be in the animated shorts (their primary medium). Donald was always a tantrum waiting to be unleashed when pushed too far, and Mickey (barring his earliest appearances) was a squeaky-clean underdog overcoming adversity through pluck and cunning. Neither of those are terrible characterizations, but they are thin if you want a story more involved than a clothesline to hang a series of gags on.

So in his collection we see Donald as still quick to temper, but he's brought down to earth by the responsibilities of raising his nephews and going through a series of jobs (usually under his uncle Scrooge, woefully underrepresented in this volume) and adventures that transform him from a universal butt monkey to, well, something approaching the type of action hero that Mickey would mimic in his shorts.

And Mickey, for his part, undergoes a more protracted metamorphosis. As the commentary in the two Gottfredson volumes points out, Mickey's character matures as the strip itself evolves from a gag-heavy series mining the animated shorts for ideas into a serialized adventure strip that produced story ideas of its own. At the start Mickey is rather youthful (apparently there's a point where Minnie comments on waiting to go to college, making them teenagers) and driven by eagerness, but by the end of the second volume he's more serious (if endlessly optimistic) and more fully fits the Douglas Fairbanks role Walt envisioned for him (as related by the aforementioned commentary). He's more confident and capable as the strip goes on.

This change comes through in an interesting way as the final story of volume two sees the unofficial ushering out of Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow and the comic introduction of Dippy Dawg (later renamed Goofy, already introduced in the animated shorts and becoming more popular with the animators than the rubberhose holdovers that were Horace and Clarabelle). As the commentary notes, the horse and cow filled the role of older siblings to Mickey and Minnie, even if Horace was more bluster than bravado and Mickey was clearly the main hero, but Dippy-Goofy, from the start, is completely incompetent and hapless and serves as a better comic foil for Mickey.

Really, the historical context of the strip and its relation to the studio at large, relayed through the commentary, is a priceless benefit of these volumes.

Ultimately Mickey in the strips isn't a wild change from Mickey in the cartoons of the same time period (mid-1930's), but the longer stories give his struggles more weight and triumphs more value, and ultimately he is a much more well-rounded character than the bland corporate mascot that most people today think of him as. Donald comes out of 'Andes' as a more radically changed/reinvented character under the pen of Carl Barks.

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Beyond the characterization aspect all three volumes are wonderful for a shared energy and anything-goes sense of adventure in their stories. Barks is more wild and free by far, with square hens that lay rock-like eggs and witches and golden trees and classic voodoo zombies and rubber bricks, but Gottfredson wasn't a slouch himself. One Mickey story involves a giant dirigible carrying an entire township of sky pirates and giant magnetized web, and another centers around a strange crimewave involving people being robbed of their hair and flannel underwear. They're more realistic than Barks only by default.

But the Mickey strips, even through volume 2, well after Gottfredson has found his feet and shifted the strip's focus, suffer from the daily strip format. Volume 2's Blaggard Castle has obvious padding in places and Air Mail, the aforementioned sky pirate story, introduces a grand idea (the dirigible) but then ends it with Mickey making a few strafes and then lassoing the zeppelin by its... pointy thing at the front. Very fast resolution to a story that had developed at a steady, thoughtful pace up until then.

But it is a step up from volume 1, where it's clear Gottfredson was finding his feet as a storyteller (though what was unclear was how much of the earliest stuff was him). The first story, the titular race to Death Valley, is collection of set-pieces and hurdles for Mickey and Minnie in a rather random sequence, and in a larger sense there's a jump-to-a-new-place fidgetiness in how one story follows another. The most striking example is when a boxing story brings back Butch, a thug Mickey befriended in an earlier story, coming in to help Mickey win his fight. When that story wrapped up the next focused on Mickey trying to reform Butch and help him fit in with high society, a story that ended abruptly when the two chanced upon a circus and the focus shifted to Mickey trying his hand at several odd-jobs (Butch, for his part, disappears a few strips into this sequence). There's no real endings to the high society and circus stories, it's just that a new story takes over. By the second volume Gottfredson had gotten much better at following a standard rising arc story.

The Barks collection, for its part, is a collection of stories ranging from 1 to 20 pages. The longer stories are easily the best, with room to grow and the chance to travel from one location to another and the action can build up, while the 1 pagers are just simple gags, set-up and punchline. There's little deadweight here, except perhaps some of the essays in the end which go a little too intellectual for my taste. I don't consider comics a low art, but I don't think Barks was intending half of what some people seem to have read into his work.

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A last thing I have to comment on, and this has nothing to do with the quality of the collections, is something strange from the Mickey strips. It's the design of Mickey's town. The strips in these two volumes go from 1930-1934, and if you look at the backgrounds you can see a growth from a rural farming community to something closer to a suburb. Based on what I've seen in silent films from right before this point (and the Disney shorts made at the time), I guess most of the country/world still had a view that small towns were the norm and larger cities were a unique concept, and these strips have a time capsule quality in that you can see a parallel in how the population moved to bigger communities and towns grew markedly.

It does create for some odd moments, though. Late in volume 2 there's a strip where Mickey and Minnie discuss some chickens they own, even though by this point their hometown was easily more than a farming community (or was chicken-raising common during the Depression for financial reasons?).

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Oh, and a final note: the Mickey strips are from the 1930s and stereotypes of the time are on display, but to no greater extent than you would see in anything else from that period. It's not deliberately racist or prejudiced, just less informed than we are today, and overall it's fair for its day.