Art of the Comic Strip, Part 2

In the previous post, I told you about my absolute favorite comic strip ever, Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye. Now, I'll discuss the close runner-up, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse.

There are a lot of things to like about this feature: the engaging stories, the breathtaking action, the humor, the well-rounded characters, and the animation-calibre artwork. And so much of this is due to the creativity and talent of one man, Floyd Gottfredson.

24-year-old Utah native Gottfredson was an animator at the Disney Studios in 1930 when Walt made him the back-up guy for the brand-new comic strip that was to be distributed by King Features Syndicate. Walt started out writing it and his animation partner Ub Iwerks did the art.

When the strip started, Walt wasn't really sure what to do with it, so he wrote gag situations based on the company's cartoon shorts. Then King Features, who had noticed that other humorous comic strips were being converted to adventure continuities, asked Disney to do the same with Mickey Mouse. So, he did, by writing a Western-mystery story in which Mickey is constantly threatened with drowning, hanging, and other perils.

The first two artists for the strip left the company, so Walt asked Gottfredson to take on the art job for a few weeks (a stint that turned into 45 years). After a few more weeks, Walt passed on the writing chores to Gottfredson, as well, and Floyd did all the scripting and art until late 1932. Then he plotted the stories while other people did the dialogue for him. He also kept penciling the strip but got others to ink his work.

For the first couple of years, Gottfredson was in a learning phase. He worked hard to plot and draw extended stories while perfecting the blend of suspense and humor needed for the new comics genre he was creating--the funny-animal adventure tale. In mastering the serial format, he learned to do the following: summarize the previous day's action in the first panel, advance the action in the next two or three panels, and close with a puzzle or cliffhanger in the final panel so that readers would just have to return the next day. Added to this was the requirement to make the dangers realistic and threateningly suspenseful but still tongue-in-cheek.

Sometimes, the cartoons provided good starting points for the plots of Gottfredson's continuities. Since he already had a basic plot, he could spend more time on the development of story structure, motivation, and pacing. And he could search out other sources for additional elements. Sometimes these sources were other Disney cartoons. For example, the basic premise of "The Great Orphanage Robbery" came from Mickey's Mellerdrammer, the scenario of which Gottfredson expanded into a crime thriller. He added a chase sequence from The Klondike Kid and a theme from Mickey's Good Deed.

When the animated movies weren't much help, Gottfredson turned to popular live-action films, real people, and his own imagination. "Editor-in-Grief" was based on the crime-related films of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. "Land of Long Ago" was a Mickey version of the silent-film adaptation of Conan Doyle's The Lost World. "The Bat Bandit of Inferno Gulch" drew inspiration from The Bat Whispers, the Cisco Kid movies, and Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Then there were the allegorical tales, mostly told from a conservative viewpoint. Gottfredson covered the Depression ("The Seven Ghosts"), democracy vs. aristocracy ("Monarch of Medioka"), the dangers of atomic power ("Island in the Sky"), American exceptionalism ("Mickey Mouse Meets Robinson Crusoe"), labor unions ("The Plumber's Helper"), and the welfare state ("The Miracle Master"). Yet even these were, for the most part, clever and entertaining.

But Gottfredson's finest hour probably came with the serial "The Phantom Blot," which appeared only a few months before the Nazis invaded Poland. This tale is full to the rim with paranoia: Americans feared that their shores were no longer safe from foreign invasion. Therefore, Gottfredson personified this with his greatest villain, the title character, a "black ghost" in a body-length cloak with vertical holes for his eyes.

Because of an editorial edict forbidding him from killing any characters, the artist showed violence in a tongue-in-cheek way by having the Blot set up elaborate traps (with ropes, guns, etc.) meant to dispatch Mickey. The story climaxed with a boat-and-aquaplane chase, after which Mickey uncovered the Blot as--what else?--a foreign spy.

At the height of World War II, Gottfredson hired radio veteran Bill Walsh to write the continuities so that he could concentrate on the art. The new scribe brought his own quirky storytelling to the strip. His was much different from Gottfredson's: dark and gothic, with genuine supernatural elements (which Gottfredson had previously explained away) and a significant reliance on inventive hi-tech. Another thing Walsh did was to return Mickey to the role he'd had in the thirties: populist hero. One "average little guy" who was adept with technology could conquer any enemy nation by himself.

Walsh stayed on until the mid-50s, when continuities were dropped in favor of daily gags. Gottfredson made it to 1975, when he retired.

There's no denying that Floyd Gottfredson's art was fantastic. His excellent use of line and panel layout simulated the motion of the animated shorts, making the characters on the page seem alive. And he managed this with a drawing hand that had little if any flexibility due to a childhood accident. He was forced to move his whole arm while drawing, which gave his art a kind of sweep and majesty. His Mickey was practically--and appropriately--cinematic.

But his art wasn't his primary accomplishment. Floyd Gottfredson was always first a story man. His visuals were always in the service of the story.

And such stories! Filled with mad scientists, sea pirates, air pirates, haunted castles, horse racing, con men, dictators, sea serpents, ray guns, submarines, alligators, zombies, genies, underground kingdoms, world travel, the future, and so, so much more!

But Gottfredson's greatest accomplishment as the force behind Mickey Mouse was his development of the title character. Whereas the cartoon version aged out of his role as the scrappy, funny hero, becoming the straight man to Donald Duck and Goofy, the comic-strip mouse remained interesting through the years when he was an adventurer.

Floyd Gottfredson found the heart of the character and defined (and refined) his core, perhaps even better than Walt Disney himself did. Day after day for two and a half decades, readers eagerly opened their newspapers not only to experience new excitement and laughs but also to marvel at the depth and complexity of a cartoon mouse.

References: Warren Spector (video game creator), Thomas Andrae (academic and author), Bill Blackbeard (comic strip scholar), David Gerstein (Co-editor of the Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson series).

#storytelling #comics