Collect Mickey Mouse, Vol. 1: Race To Death Valley Composed By Floyd Gottfredson Distributed As Volume

strips come from thewhen 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, I read volumebefore I read volumeof this series, Volumeis a quicker read, since the strips reprinted in this volume are shorter and filled with more gags than in volumewhich featured several long running adventure stories of the Mouse and his fellow characters.
Still, if one were to read the Essays amp Special Features, which I did, then these parts can be rather dry,

I also can't give it astar 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 "closeminded 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. Wow surprise surprise, right, the big virgin gave the Mickey book five! The big stinky virgin gave this book five! 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's alone are worth six times the price of the book, Long live Mickey indeed. /
Floyd Gottfredson was hired by sitelinkWalt Disney in, 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 inbetweener 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 sitelinkUb 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 inthe 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 theth century, He will be the main writer of those strips until the middle of the's, and will remain on pencil duties on them for fortyfive years, until his retirement in.


This book presents the Mickey Mouse strips published daily in hundreds of American newspapers fromto, 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, sitelinkDavid 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'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 cowriter 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 earlyth 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 of the'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! 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 DigestAprilwhen I was.
It'll be a few volumes before the first of those strips are collected here's "BarNone 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 "piecut eyes" Mickey, so I'm having a blast, I do like the circleeyes version that developed bye, g. , in Fantasia, and the's golfer casual wardrobe is okay, too, I really hate theD CGI visual Mickey was really not designed forD,

This is the real Mickey Mouse the adventurous scrapper, not the bland corporate logo he largely became overyears 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 inand, also have flaws endemic to their time most obviously with the preFloyd strips by Walt and Mickey's cocreator Ub Iwerks, Amazingly, considering this is an officiallylicensed 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!,