Mickey Mouse, Vol. 1: Race to Death Valley

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse #1

by Floyd Gottfredson

Today everyone knows Mickey Mouse as the cheerful ambassador of
all things Disney. But back in the 1930s, Mickey gained fame as a rough-and-tumble, two-fisted epic hero — an adventurous
scrapper matching wits with mobsters, kidnappers, spies, and even (gulp!) city slickers! And Mickey’s greatest
feats of derring-do took place in his daily comic strip, written and drawn by one of the greatest cartoonists of the 20th
century — Floyd Gottfredson.



For its first quarter-century, Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse was a rip-roaring serial: the most popular cartoon-based
comic of its time, a trendsetting adventure continuity aimed at both kids and grown-ups, and the foundation on which
all later Disney comics grew — including the adventures of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge by Gottfredson’s Disney
colleague Carl Barks.



Glimpses of Floyd Gottfredson’s masterpiece have been reprinted over the years, most famously in Bill Blackbeard’s
classic Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. But the whole strip has never been comprehensively collected in
English — until now! Fantagraphics Books is proud to bring this classic Disney creation to a 21st century audience in
its entirety, starting from the strip’s 1930 launch. Relive Mickey’s race to a gold mine with Pegleg Pete hot on his heels;
Mickey’s life on the lam after being framed for bank robbery; even Mickey’s ringside battle with a hulking heavyweight
champ! The premiere volume features a dozen different adventures starring Mickey, his gal Minnie and her uncle Mortimer,
his pals Horace Horsecollar and Butch, the villainous Pegleg Pete, and the mysterious and shrouded Fox.



Gottfredson’s vibrant visual storytelling has never been more beautifully reproduced; we promise the best reprinting
the strip has ever seen, with each daily lovingly restored from Disney’s original negatives and proof sheets. “Death
Valley” also includes more than 50 pages of fascinating supplementary features, including rare behind-the-scenes art and
vintage publicity material from the first two years of the strip. Critics, scholars, seasoned Disney archivists, and fellow
cartoonists provide commentary and historical essays on the strip’s creation and execution.



Walt Disney often said that his studio’s success “all started with a Mouse” — Walt himself wrote the Mickey Mouse
strip before turning it over to the able hands of Gottfredson — and today Mickey is among the world’s most recognizable
icons. Now it’s time to rediscover the wild, unforgettable personality behind the icon: Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey
Mouse.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Humor, Fiction, Comic Strips, Adventure, Graphic Novels Comics

286 pages, Unknown Binding

First published May 18, 2011

About the author

Arthur Floyd Gottfredson (1905-1986) was an American cartoonist. He is known for his defining work on the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, which he drew from 1929 to 1975, and mostly plotted himself from 1929 to 1945. His impact on the character of Mickey Mouse is often compared to the one that cartoonist Carl Barks had on Donald Duck. Because of the large international circulation of his strips, reprinted for decades in some European countries like Italy and France, Gottfredson can be seen as one of the most influential cartoonists of the 20th century. Many groundbreaking comic book artists, like Carl Barks and Osamu Tezuka, declared to have been inspired by his work.

Floyd Gottfredson grew up in a Mormon family from Utah. He started drawing as a kid on doctor's advice, as a form of rehabilitation after a sever injury, which left his dominant arm partially disabled for life. After taking some cartooning correspondence courses, teenage Floyd secured a job as cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Telegram.
At age 23, Floyd moved to California with his wife and family. He interviewed at the Disney Studios, hoping to land a position as a comic strip artist, but was hired as in-between animator instead. In that period writer Walt Disney and artist Ub Iwerks were starting a series of daily syndicated newspaper comic strips featuring Mickey Mouse, the character the two had created for animation the year before. A few months into the publication of the strips however, Iwerks left the Studios. Walt decided then to promote Gottfredson to the role of Mickey Mouse strip penciler, remembering his original request at the job interview. Not long after that, Disney left the entire process of creation of the strip to Gottfredson, who would eventually become head of a small 'comic strips department' within the Disney Studios.
Up to 1955, Mickey's strips were 'continuity adventures': the strips were not just self-contained gags, but they composed long stories that would stretch in the newspapers for months. In this context, Gottfredson had to developed Mickey's personality way beyond his animation counterpart. He made him an adventurer and multi-tasking hero, putting him in all kind of settings and genre-parodies: thriller, sci-fi, urban comedy, adventure in exotic lands, war stories, western, and so on.
Gottfredson scripted the stories on his own for a few years, only getting help for the inking part of the process. (Most notably by Al Taliaferro, who will become himself the main artist on the Silly Symphonies and Donald Duck syndicated strips.) Starting from around 1932, Gottfredson worked with various writers, mostly Ted Osbourne and Merril deMarris, who provided scripts for the strips, while Floyd retained the role of plotter and penciler. Starting from 1945, Gottfredson left all writing duties to writer Bill Wash.
In 1955, by request of the Syndicate, Mickey Mouse strips stopped being continuous stories, and became self-contained gag. Gottfredson would remain in his role of strip artist for twenty more years, up to his retirement in 1975.
Gottfredson died in 1986, with his achievements going mostly unknown to the larger American public (as his strips were technically all signed 'Walt Disney').
In 2006, twenty years after his death, Floyd Gottfredson was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Hall of Fame.

Reviews

[Darrell Reimer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The genesis of a soulless corporate mascot gone global was, incredibly, a robust and vibrant affair that developed daily in the newspapers of North America all through the Great Depression. Via the pen and ink of Floyd Gottfredson, Mickey Mouse was portrayed as an embattled and even occasionally embittered little character who struggled mightily against the odds, sometimes just to keep from despair. The strips are reproduced at scale, with a clarity of contrast that brings out Gottfredson's fine line work. This is quite simply the very best reproduction that Gottfredson's work has received to date, surpassing (certainly) the original newsprint and even the glossy Uncensored Mouse collection from '89.

NB: this volume includes the legendary, "Mickey Attempts Suicide" storyline.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

In truth, i'm so far away from the phase of reading disney comics (yeah, to where I grew up, for better or worse it's a phase) that I don't know why I bothered buying this book (and the next one of the series, while we're at it). It's been at least 4 years since they became an addition to my collection and i'm guessing the reason lied somewhere between curiosity of early disney works and Gottfredson, wanting to have a look at that side of comic book history and, well, collectors' mania that urges you to spend without any filtering on the relationship between the comic and your personal taste, or, to be honest,having basic consumerist decency. It's always a ragged return to yet-to-be-read street the last few months.

Putting all that useless intro aside, Floyd's Mickey strips are archaic in an aristocratic sense. Of course they're full of stereotypes, direct and indirect racism, misogyny etc etc. The editors try their best to put all that elements in context, basically going with the best and safest solution-having disclaimers without messing with even one panel or word in the whole strip. The stories are fairly simplistic, depicting the reading needs of the era when it comes to basic entertainment. It was right after the huge crash that turned hundred of thousands to poverty and these appity light stories were perfect to pull the mind of the average Joe in safer places, at least momentarily. No reason to judge them too harshly on that front. The art though, was rather enjoyable. Here some bold readers may detect an embryonic "ligne claire" blooming on the other side of the atlantic. Small panels with beautiful drawings both classic and detailed, unfortunately overwhelmed by huge speech bubbles.

The big plus on this edition,as most of the titles Fantagraphics publishes, are the extras. I think this volume (and it's safe to assume this happens to all the volumes of the series) is the most complete edition of any comic I ever had in my hands. The plethora of interviews, articles, editorials, pictures is simple stunning and many congratulations to everyone responsible are in order. That's the main reason I give with no remorse a heart-felt 4/5.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love vintage newspaper comic strips, their rich visual language, and what they say about the period they were printed in. When it comes to re-introducing vintage comics to a new audience, Fantagraphics is one of the best – repackaging often overlooked strips in handsome bound volumes with expert commentary and historic tidbits. In 2011, they teamed up with the Disney company to take on the task of republishing their Mickey Mouse daily comic strip from its classic 1930s era onward. It’s a fabulous project, still ongoing (the ninth volume, Rise of the Rhyming Man, publishes this month). I’d even go as far as to pronounce first volume, Race to Death Valley, as the best book of this type I’ve ever seen. Although I’ve been reading and collecting Fantagraphic’s Complete Peanuts books since they first came out in 2005, the quality of the the first two Mickey volumes has prompted me to switch (besides, Charles M. Schulz, bless his soul, got kind of safe and bland by the mid-’70s).

Probably the most significant thing these Mickey Mouse books does is to put the name of its artist and writer, Floyd Gottfredson, front and center. Although Walt Disney himself drew the first Mickey strips from the late ’20s, he eventually came to rely on a team of men to write and draw the strip –despite Disney’s unique signature printed on every installment. Initially hired as an in-betweener in Disney’s animation department, Gottfredson quickly appealed to the boss to take over duties on the daily strip. Disney waved his magic wand and granted Gottfredson his wish in 1930. Smart move on Disney’s part – the then 25 year-old Gottfredson ended up guiding the Mickey Mouse strip for a full 45 years! That’s nearly as long a tenure as what Charles M. Schulz had with Peanuts.

Gottfredson truly put a lot of vivacity and spunk into the Mickey comic, complementing the rodent’s screen image as the scrappy underdog with a heart of gold. The cartoonist transformed what had been a standard gag-a-day format into a thrilling adventure, with broad, character-filled stories which would unfold for months at a time. His first important story was Mickey Mouse in Death Valley, which had Mickey and Minnie Mouse on a frantic search for a desert gold mine belonging to Minnie’s wealthy uncle. In typical Depression-era fashion, they’re pursued by colorful heavies, including crooked lawyer Sylvester Shyster and his dumb henchman Pegleg Pete, along with a mysterious figure known as The Fox. It’s a rollicking tale, with each panel brimming with wonderful details (did Gottfredson slip in a white-haired cousin of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit?). In other stories, Mickey takes on a fearsome cat boxer named Creamo Catnera (a play on real-life champ Primo Carnera), becomes a roustabout at a circus, and tussles with a band of greedy gypsies. In the latter story, Mickey and Minnie’s friends Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow take on a prominent role. I love how Horace and Clarabelle are the pragmatic older couple pals of impetuous Mickey and Minnie – sadly, their prominence in the Disney cartoons and comics would diminish as the ’30s went on.

Each Fantagraphics Mickey Mouse volume highlights Gottfredson’s best stories from a certain period, in chronological order. While Race to Death Valley covers the years 1930-31 (overlapping into the first week of 1932), the next volume, Trapped on Treasure Island, picks up where the previous one left off, reprinting strips from January 1932 up through the first week in 1934. I purchased both of these volumes at a great discount at Daedalus books. They’re also available via Fantagraphics’s website and (of couse) at Amazon.com. (Scrubbles.net review, June 1, 2016)

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

While recent comic stories, movies, and games like Epic Mickey are reintroducing a more adventurous Mickey Mouse to audiences more familiar with him as a suburban homeowner, more straight man to the comic antics of his pets and friends than a leading man in his own right, this book proves that this is only a return to form. Mickey, under the pen of writer/artist Floyd Gottfredson, is a plucky, feisty adventurer, full of spirit and attitude. It's also a fantastic adventure strip.

Artist Carl Barks justifiably earns a lot of credit for his comic book stories about Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. As humorous adventure stories, they're the equivalent of widescreen technicolor masterpieces, perfectly fusing character, story, and setting. On the comics page, Gottfredson was doing the same thing with Mickey Mouse. Just as Barks used the comic book format to pace his adventures, Gottfredson grew to become a master of the daily strip format, telling fast-paced extended serials that managed to combine nail-biting suspense, edge-of-your-seat action and cliffhangers, and laugh-out-loud humor. His storytelling, within four small daily panels, is detailed and clear.

This book is not only impressive for collecting Gottfredson's strips from the very beginning, but also for the overall package. It includes a number of articles not only putting Gottfredson's strips into the context of the Mickey comic strip as a whole, as well as in the overall creation of Mickey Mouse and Disney history, but also within the context of American culture at the time. The book also features comic strip syndicate ads and premiums, as well as covers of books and magazines, both national and international, reprinting the strips. And while Gottfredson is deservedly the feature of this book, it doesn't overlook the earlier strips (written by Walt Disney himself). They are included as an appendix.

So why only four stars? No strip or artist, no matter how good, ever emerges fully formed. As great as these Gottfredson strips are, you can still see a cartoonist feeling things out and learning his craft. Among the rare missteps are a sequence involving the hilarious antics of Mickey Mouse trying to commit suicide using various methods. It's still great, seeing the growth of Gottfredson as an artist, but I know that the strip will only get better in future books.

[Ludwig Aczel · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10
Floyd Gottfredson was hired by Walt Disney in 1929, back in the early days of the studios. Floyd volunteered to serve as a cartoonist, but Walt had no intention to produce comic strips. So the young artist was put at work as an in-betweener (supporting animator artist). Walt changed his mind a few months later, when publishers convinced him that there were big money to be made out of a Mickey Mouse syndicated strip! For a couple of months those strips were written by Disney himself and drawn by Ub Iwerks, basically the creators of the character and the main men behind his cartoons. However, Walt was still uninterested in writing comics, and when Iwerks left the company he dropped the strip duty on that Floyd kid who had asked for it in his job interview! So happened that in 1930 the unknown and unexperienced Floyd Gottfredson became the only writer and pencil artist of Mickey Mouse, a comic strip syndicated all over the world. In retrospective, never decision was wiser, as the young man turned out to be one of the most influential cartoonists of the 20th century. He will be the main writer of those strips until the middle of the 40's, and will remain on pencil duties on them for forty-five years, until his retirement in 1975.

This book presents the Mickey Mouse strips published daily in hundreds of American newspapers from 1929 to 1931. The volume also shines for a fantastic set of extras: generous historical essays and a lot of art material witnessing the influence of Mickey Mouse comics all over the Western world. (Kudos to the editor of the volume, David Gerstein, for such a great collection.)

This early phase of Gottfredson's career is still quite rough.
The art style has not yet the round and morbid touch showcased in later strips from the middle of the 30's. The inking is provided first by one Earl Duvall, then by Al Taliaferro, who will become famous for his Donald Duck stips a few years later. Taliaferro soft inking is definitely the one that adds some artistic value.
We should mention that at this point Walt Disney has not yet assigned any script co-writer to Gottfredson, so the man is left alone to learn how to deliver decent gags. It is a delicate job to create a visual joke per day while composing all the strips into one long continuous story. And if it is true that Gottfredson did not invent anything from this perspective - since continuous adventures in comic strip form were already quite common at the time - it is also undeniable that in the years to come he and his collaborators will elevate the genre to the highest degrees of refinement.

In this first volume, Mickey Mouse is still portrayed as a young rascal operating in a cartoonist version of the rural America of the early 20th century. He is spirited, yet more often humble than arrogant. He is sarcastic and sly, but never mean. One can already glimpse the heroic and noble attitude that the character will acquire in later adventures, even if for the moment such an attitude is still embedded in the edgy tone of funny animals of those days. The support cast is also great. The portraits of Minnie Mouse and Clarabelle Cow obviously rely on dated stereotypes about women, but both characters do not lack in spirit. The funny anthropomorphic dog Butch works nicely as an ignorant criminal sidekick for Mickey. He will unfortunately disappear soon after that. Last but not least, the other star of this volume is the great Horace Horsecollar. Before Donald Duck and Goofy would rise as the Disney stars of the 30's, Horace was the man! Well...the horseman, I guess. Sarcastic and energetic, cocky but always well meaning, the horse served well as Mickey's sidekick and was a favourite of Disney himself.

My favourite stories of the volume are two legendary tales: Boxing Champion, where sparring partner Mickey is obliged to fight the heavyweight world champion to avoid to be lynched (!) by a mob; and Mickey Mouse and the Ransom Plot (also called Mickey Mouse and the Gypsies), where Mickey and his pal Horace have to save Minnie from a nasty lot of gypsies kidnappers. Another famous story from this era is Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers, mostly notorious for containing a series of suicide attempts by Mickey. (Apparently an idea that Disney himself suggested to Gottfredson!)
Yeah, you can understand that these stories have very outdated narrative settings and are full of stereotypical portraits. So, remember to turn on your brain and contextualise when reading and judging them!

[Dimitris Papastergiou · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mickey Mouse's origin of sorts. (comic book form)

Fun read, and even though it shows its age, it can still hold its own.

We also get nice info on Gottfredson and lots of bonus stuff that's interesting to read about what it was back then with creating pretty much Mickey Mouse in comics.

[Lionel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book. I first learned about Gottfredson's Mickey nearly three decades ago, but most of my encounters with it have been piecemeal. It's great to finally have the beginning of a comprehensive, chronological collection in a sturdy, beautiful, affordable English edition.

The book covers Gottfredson's first work on the strip, which began very early in the strip's life (for the sake of completeness, the pre-Gottfredson strips are included in one of the archival supplements in the rear). A wealth of supplemental material is included after the strips. The strip apparently began as a humorous gag-a-day strip with limited continuity, and those early strips are pretty lackluster. The syndicate apparently suggested (strongly) that Walt try a more adventurous format, which was then in vogue, and so Walt began the title storyline, "Race to Death Valley". The book begins with this story. Gottfredson picked up the art chores a couple of weeks into the story, and not long after Walt handed off the writing to Gottfredson as well. Gottfredson remained the strips writer through the '70s (though he usually had help with the art).

Despite some dismissive comments in the introductory material that Gottfredson was just starting to learn the ropes with this first story, I actually enjoyed it the most of the stories in the book. The other stories aren't in any way bad, but most of them didn't have quite the same balance of slapstick and pure adventure that the opening story did. The other stories were for the most part quite good as well, but still experimental too--Gottfredson was trying different settings, pacing, and balances of the competing slapstick and adventure elements.

As is typical for Fantagraphics reprint collections, the production values on the book are high. Nice paper, crisp reproduction, a wonderful cloth and matte cover, solid binding. The only thing I found myself wishing for was a bound in ribbon bookmark.

Looking forward to more in this series, as well as their forthcoming collections of Carl Barks' duck stories.

[Alex Firer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow surprise surprise, right, the big virgin gave the Mickey book five stars! The big stinky virgin gave this book five stars! You know it's high time you people gave me a little RESPECT around here.

Anyway the comics and the special features are these bulletproof near perfect depression killers and the special features could not be more incredibly thorough. The press releases from the 1930's alone are worth six times the price of the book. Long live Mickey indeed.

[Eric Orchard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, fast moving and a blast. Great 1930s adventure comics. Better than I hoped it would be.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, this comic strip has real joy to it, a bounce and energy that usually propels you through stock plots and often questionable elements that haven’t dated well at all. Mickey almost gets lynched multiple times throughout the volume, and then there are the ethnic stereotypes. In his adventures, Mickey encounters a group of Roma in a story which is deeply unfortunate. But then, buried late in the volume is the initial series of strips, downright ghastly ones written by Walt Disney himself, where Mickey is pitted against savage cannibal islanders. In a world entirely of animals, these are depicted as humans who speak an awful gibberish and have enormous white lips and huge nose rings, through which Mickey tosses a spear in a joke that must have had them slapping their knees in 1930.

Thankfully, this book is bursting with essays that help to put all of this in context. These resist the urge to treat Disney as a secular religion, with Walt and Mickey acting as the Father and the Son; for the most part, they’re well-researched pieces that are downright essential if you’re going to reprint this work. And this work should be in print and is worth reading. After Disney hands over the strip to Floyd Gottfriedson, it becomes a lushly illustrated, buoyant adventure, of a piece creatively and quality-wise with the cartoons of this golden age of animation. Gottfriedson was one of the best cartoonists of his time. The only problem being that, in many aspects, his time was awful. As one of my favorite comics critics put it about a future volume, “it's the kind of book that, if I saw someone reaching for it on my shelf, I'd jump in front of it like I was taking a bullet rather than have to explain why I had a book full of caricatures of ‘African Savages’ trying to eat Mickey Mouse.”

[Nicholas Driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this because I loved some of Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse comics as a kid, and this is a slavish and loving tome to the master artist and Mickey pioneer. I have to admit, though, that I was disappointed. I am giving it four stars mostly because it goes so far to pay tribute to the many artists behind the old newspaper strips, with biographical matter for even smaller artists, articles on the characters, individual introductions to story arcs with comments on content and context, pictures of covers from international versions, and more. It's actually overwhelming how much was in here.

The comics themselves, though, left something to be desired for me personally. I loved getting a chance to read them, and I loved the art. Super fun to see Ub Iwerks comics from before Gottfredson took over (though I think it would have made more sense to put Iwerks' strips at the front rather than the back). I liked some of the jokes and I liked a lot of the snappy dialogue.

I just didn't care for any of the stories really. I remember loving Gottfredson's later stories as a kid, such as the Phantom Blot tales, or a wild west one that I forgot the title of, or the city in the sky. I remember finding the high adventure exciting and enthralling. These stories here, though, often felt a bit lifeless to me, and the jokes often were kind of flat for me personally. There was one big adventure as Mickey and Minnie try to save Mortimer Mouse's mine from nasty folk trying to steal it, and the tale has its moments. The others are mostly gags--Mickey boxing, Mickey getting involved with a circus, Mickey dealing with a cantankerous neighbor, Mickey dealing with Gypsies. I had read the circus ones (some of them) as a kid, so there was some nostalgia there, but overall the comics here didn't quite scratch my itch!

[Rex Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

These strips come from the 1930 when Mickey Mouse was still in his infancy. This was a year after he appeared in his first cartoon and many things about him were still being worked out. The first thing one notices is how the roster is very short. No Donald Duck and crew. No Goofy. Pluto is introduced halfway through the book. So the only characters on deck are Mickey, Minnie - referred to here as a flapper -, Horsecollar, and Clarabella Cow.

Mickey's appearance is also different. In the beginning he was given perfectly black button eyes, before he graduated to the regular orbs we know today. The adventures here are humorous, really longer scale versions of the cartoon, and very fun. The adventure strip was starting to become more popular in the comics world and Floyd Gottfredson picked up the task with gusto, writing and drawing the comic for close to forty years.

Also included are numerous essays about the comic strip and the men behind them, plus a collection of the first weeks of the comic written and drawn by Ub Iwerks. Good fun for the Mickey enthusiast.

[Gijs Grob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first volume of the complete Mickey Mouse comics by Floyd Gottfredson shows the comic's humble and somewhat erratic beginnings. In the very end we can read Mickey's very first comic strip panels, drawn by Ub Iwerks and written by Walt Disney himself. The book starts with Mickey's first long adventure, the rather sloppy 'Mickey Mouse in Death Valley'. The strip only gains momentum, however, in 'Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers', in a story mixing poverty, crime, and jealousy into a typical Gottfreson mix. On July 8, 1931, Pluto enters the strip, and in 'Mickey Mouse and the Ransom Plot' (July-November 1931) Mickey, Minnie, Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow have an adventure together for the first time, presented as good friends. The panels are reproduced perfectly, and Mickey's adventures are annotated wonderfully by David Gerstein and his co-workers. After 1931 Mickey's adventures would become better and more exciting, but every Mickey fan should start here.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read three full adventures from this book, and I think I'm ready to move on. It's an entertaining book, but not massively compelling or essential. Gottfredson does a good job mixing fairly routine (humdrum might be a more apt if less charitable descriptor) daily gags with Republic serial cliffhangers, and the artwork is generally strong. That said, each arc has at least one escape/twist that doesn't really work, and neither the plots nor the characterization are particularly striking to me. Also, the cartoonish nature of the antics often undermines the supposed peril of the dangers faced.

I can see the appeal, but I can't say these strips measure up to the intoxicating high adventure of Carl Barks' Duck comics.

[Paxton Holley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly 300 pages of Mickey Mouse newspaper strips by Floyd Gottfredson from the 30s. This was pre-most of the movies. And Minnie was about the only other character around. The distribution company asked Walt to stop the one off gags and make the strips more adventurous. So they brought in Gottfredson and started long overarching adventure plots.

This was a lot of fun. Mickey is a scrappy little dude. Besides Mickey and Minnie, the main characters that show up are Peg Leg Pete, Horace Horsecollar, and Clarabell the Cow. Gottfredson’s art is great. And the longform storytelling works. Really enjoyed this.

[StrictlySequential · Rating 3 out of 5]

April 1st 1930 »-> March 31st 1932

≠ Symbolarceny ≠:
It's going to be weird seeing pre-nazi-theft swastikas (if that was its contemponomenclature) on gypsy and cannibal clothing that subtly appear over a year apart in here. Those megalomaniac monsters drastically polarized an objectively interesting symbol, throughout a shocking amount of the world, that even rises/bullies strong emotion and even action, simply by sight, that will surely endure at least 100 more years...

Do NOT clean this series without expertise- its a quick»rippy moisture and color bleeder!

[Krzyś Dz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nicely gathered the VERY FIRST Mickey Mouse comic strips (Jan 1930 - Jan 1932). Also interesting articles about Floyd Gottfredson, Ub Iwerks and other artists. Plus history of Mickey 's strips and some covers. Definitely worth to read!

[Robert Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed reading these early comic strips of Mickey Mouse. More adventurous, interesting than today's Mickey.

[Mo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good comics that stand the test of time.

[Lulu]

1930-1955

[Jakub · Rating 5 out of 5]

0https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

[LobsterQuadrille · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Horace and Clarabelle's romance is a standout, and Butch's storyline is a nice addition.

[Michael Reddy]

Read Up To Sheiks and Lovers

[Canavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

✭✭✭✭

[alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up in a record store when I was 12 and loved it

[Marcos Kopschitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Race to Death Valley é o primeiro volume da coleção das tiras históricas de Mickey, escrito e desenhado por Floyd Gottfredson, publicada pela editora americana Fantagraphics Books – portanto, exatamente no original, em preto e branco e em inglês.

Além das tiras, há quase 30 páginas de material de alta qualidade: prefácio, apresentação de cada história, análises e artigos de especialistas, e mais extras como páginas alternativas, capas de outros países, histórias de outros artistas, etc.

Parte desta resenha se repete em outras da mesma série, por serem muitos volumes, de modo que os leitores podem eventualmente encontrar um ou outro, e não os demais. Cada uma, porém, tem detalhes específicos.

A Fantagraphics vem publicando duas séries de quadrinhos históricos Disney: a dos patos de Carl Barks (Donald, Tio Patinhas, etc.) e a do Mickey de Floyd Gottfredson. Desta, já foram publicados dez volumes, com mais dois em preparação, com cerca de 280 páginas. Todos podem ser encontrados isoladamente ou em caixas com dois volumes cada uma. A primeira caixa traz os volumes 1 e 2.

Existe outra coleção do Mickey histórico sendo publicada pela Editora Abril, um projeto original da Itália, que apresenta as histórias de Mickey traduzidas e colorizadas.


Coleções históricas Disney sendo publicadas

As diversas coleções históricas Disney atualmente existente podem ser encontradas na Amazon brasileira. As da Abril, integralmente, as da Fantagraphics, pelo menos em parte. Algumas em volumes individuais ou em caixas. Verifique sempre a disponibilidade.

Está indicado o primeiro volume de cada coleção. Neste volume, procure minha resenha, na qual estão listados os volumes e caixas publicados, com links para cada um.

1. “Os Anos de Ouro de Mickey”
Em português, tradução de original italiano, a cores, Editora Abril
> Mickey na ilha misteriosa *** R

2. “Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson”
Em inglês, em preto e branco, Fantagraphics (EUA)
> Race to Death Valley] *** R

3. “The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library”
Em inglês, em cores, em formato maior (aproximadamente 19 x 26 cm), Fantagraphics (EUA)
> Christmas on Bear Mountain*** R

4. “Coleção Carl Barks defintiva”
Em português, tradução da coleção da Fantagraphics, em cores, em formato reduzido (aproximadamente 16 x 24 cm), Editora Abril
> Perdidos nos Andes *** R

*** R – Álbum já resenhado por mim. Para ler minha resenha, role a página do livro até que ela apareça.

[Keith Bowden · Rating 4 out of 5]

At last! The beginning of the complete Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comics! I've been in love with Gottfredson's work since I found Walt Disney's Comic Digest #40 (April 1973) when I was 9. It'll be a few volumes before the first of those strips are collected here (1942's "Bar-None Ranch" sequence), so we'll have plenty of time to watch his development as an artist, writer (though most of the strips were written with others) and Mickey's stylistic development. I really prefer the old "pie-cut eyes" Mickey, so I'm having a blast. I do like the circle-eyes version that developed by 1940 (e.g., in Fantasia), and the 1950's golfer casual wardrobe is okay, too. (I really hate the 3D CGI visual - Mickey was really not designed for 3D.)

This is the real Mickey Mouse - the adventurous scrapper, not the bland corporate logo he largely became over 50 years ago. And, because it's print, we can even dispense with the annoying (but appropriately squeaky, I suppose) voice that Walt gave him. (Worse: I hate Donald's "duck voice" in the cartoons - I can't understand him! but I digress.) I've longed for a series of books like this at least as much as I longed for a complete early Peanuts - and now we have both.

These strips, created in 1930 and 1931, also have flaws endemic to their time (most obviously with the pre-Floyd strips by Walt and Mickey's co-creator Ub Iwerks). Amazingly, considering this is an officially-licensed Disney product, that history has not been covered up. The warts of casual racism (blacks, gypsies) and homophobia (a lisping "sissy") remain. The infamous sequence of strips with Mickey attempting suicide in various manners (failing humorously) is in this volume, likewise unmodified.

Walt soon stopped writing the strip after Gottfredson took over the art, and Gottfredson largely wrote the series alone for awhile. His art style, and Mickey's appearance, evolved and took shape over his initial months/year and is just beautiful. My one quibble with the book is that the strips are reproduced at such a small relative size. They're larger than what we've seen in newspapers in decades, but far smaller than when they first appeared and a lot of the detail is hard to see. But I'm happy to have it! I'm here for the long haul!

[Bart Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read volume 2 before I read volume 1 of this series. Volume 1 is a quicker read, since the strips reprinted in this volume are shorter and filled with more gags than in volume 2 which featured several long running adventure stories of the Mouse and his fellow characters. Still, if one were to read the Essays & Special Features, which I did, then these parts can be rather dry.

I also can't give it a 5 star rating due to the editor reminding me that in today's modern society the mouse wouldn't condone cigarette smoking,guns, or thoughts of suicide. In the essays portion of the book, the editor introduces a short story with the caveat that the aborigines were products of "close-minded individuals ... to bolster their racist views."

Let the reader come to their own conclusions about these portrayals.

I simply don't think compilers of historical material should feel the need to make amends, or apologize for the deeds of the past. What was acceptable then, may not be acceptable now, but there's no need for the compiler to apologize for the views that might have been held by the artist, or writer. What was, was.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really want to give this book a higher rating because it is in many ways an impressive and even noble effort. The careful creit given to all hands who worked on the strips, and the treasure trove of archival materials, make a valuable addition. However, the size is just too small, at least for 48-year-old eyes. I had to squint to read alot of these strips, especially the more text-heavy ones. Something the size being used by IDW for Little Orphan Annie would have been more in order (and if they do the Sundays in subsequent volumes, the size issue will be even worse). And the frequent editorial insistence (at the behest of the Disney dragons, I assume) on pointing out the no longer acceptable elements of the strip, from racist caricatures to Mickey smoking (!) gets very tiresome. The strips themselves show Gottredson finding his feet; a lot of the gags are weak, and continuity ois often pretty loose. Nevertheless, there's a great sense of fun, and a very good balance of humour and adventure, and of a gag-a-day structure with longer ongoing narratives.

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of some of Floyd Gottfredson's run on Disney's Mickey Mouse comics is wonderful for all serious connoisseurs of graphic literature, though personally I've always found the classic funnies to be challenging to read. This is no fault of the author, the format is specifically tailored to be run as a daily strip, but modern readers that are used to the comic-book made find it laboring. Still, these comix are essential for anyone interested in the history and development of sequential arts.