Walt Disney's Mickey and the Gang: Classic Stories in Verse

by David Gerstein, Various (Artist), John Clark (Editor)

A complete collection of beautifully rendered Disney art, graphically depicting both produced and non-produced Disney cartoon shorts from the 1930s and 1940s. These story ad pages were utilized by Disney in Good Housekeeping Magazine to both promote their cartoons and to act as springboards for other merchandising. This handsome coffee-table book collects all of those ad pages and matches them up with many examples of the other material that sprang from them.

360 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

David Gerstein is an American comics author and editor as well as an animation historian. Gerstein has five books and countless comic book credits to his name. He has written many Disney comics stories, usually featuring Mickey Mouse and/or Donald Duck and provided American English script doctoring for Mickey and Donald stories that were originally written in a different language. Past employments include Egmont Creative A/S, a Danish comics studio, and Gemstone Publishing. His current work is with various affiliates of Egmont, and Fantagraphics Books.
Recurring gags in Gerstein's writing (both original stories and script doctoring of others') include quotations from Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, and T.S. Eliot, often paraphrased in a humorous manner.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book about a fascinating part of Disney's history, namely the monthly cartoon and verse pages printed in Good Housekeeping magazine from 1934-1944. The pages are reprinted here along with excellent commentary that contextualises the work, and adds many bonuses such as extra comic strips, text stories and rare animation art. A real treasure.

[Gijs Grob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains beautiful reproduction of the 'Good Housekeeping' pages: pages that the Walt Disney studio for the 'Good Housekeeping' magazine from 1934 till 1944. These pages mostly featured beautiful artwork and rhymes (often loosely) based on Disney shorts of the time. Because many of these pages were made in the early stages of film development, some of these were based on shorts that never reached completion, or would be very different from the story in the magazine. Also featured are the long stories based on the features 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' and 'Pinocchio'. The war wasn't kind to these pages, and from 1942 on one sees a steady decline of quality.
Nevertheless, the artwork is gorgeous throughout and David Gerstein places these pages in context, giving a lot of extra information. Thus this book is a treasure garden for all lovers of anything classical Disney.