Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley

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By Floyd Gottfredson (with Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, and countless others). Originally serialized in various newspapers from January 13, 1930 – January 9, 1932. Edited by David Gerstein and Gary Groth. Released by Fantagraphics.

This has been another one of those long-awaited collections of comic strips. Perhaps not as long as Pogo (still tapping my fingers there, Fantagraphics), but nevertheless many folks have been clamoring for years to see Gottfredson’s work in sequence, especially those who feel he was unfairly forgotten in comparison to Carl Barks, the most famous Disney comic book artist. (The two aren’t all that similar, but we’ll get to that when Fantagraphics puts out the Barks books later this year.) And now we have it, and one could not have asked for a better presentation, with the reproduction about as good as it gets for 80-year-old comic strips, and a veritable plethora of extras.

I’m a big fan of early cartoons. Not just the classic Disney and Warners cartoons we all grew up on television with, but the ones that were rarely shown, the black and white ‘let’s all sing and dance and bounce around for 7 minutes’ type of cartoon. Leaving aside my love of music, I feel there’s a wonderful simplicity to these types of cartoons, where you don’t have to worry too hard about realism or motivations, you can just sit back and watch the fun. And that’s sort of the cartoons Disney was making about 1930 – Mickey was only 2 years old, and though Disney’s shorts were miles ahead of everyone else, he was still singing songs, getting into scrapes, that sort of thing. Goofy was a good 2 years away, Donald 4. It was just Mickey and Minnie (and sometimes Pluto later on), having fun, getting into misunderstandings, and sometimes battling evil villains like Pegleg Pete.

It’s rather startling, therefore, to see the amount of depth we get in these comic strips presented here. Oh, it’s not huge – no need to worry about Mickey on paper being like Apartment 3-G – but you actually do see the characters worry about things like the economy, or trying to figure out their futures. Mickey’s fire chief is overworked (as he’s also the chief of police, justice of the peace, postmaster, etc.) and trying to get folks married, so it can get him some extra cash (justices of the peace are paid more!). Mickey tries to hook up Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow, and amongst his reasoning is the idea of combining their income. These Mickey Mouse comics never forget what year they’re set in.

Speaking of Horace and Clarabelle, the lack of Goofy and Donald means that they’re still major characters at this point, even more so than in the cartoons, and they’re an absolute stitch, albeit a cliched one. The comic strips rely very much on stereotypes and vaudevillian-type gags for their humor, and so Clarabelle is a prissy gossip who is easily flattered (and duped), while Horace is as stubborn as a mule, and tends to regard women in the classic “Dames. Go figure.” mode. And yes, they’re all the human-size talking animal types, excepting Pluto. Generally this isn’t noticeable, except in one bit where Mickey has to imitate a cat, and gets a bunch of cats surrounding him when he does – the sight of his large form with these small cats is very odd indeed.

I also found the language in these strips extraordinary. Leaving aside the fact that people eighty years ago spoke differently than we do today, the sheer metaphor used by Mickey, especially in the beginning strips, boggles the mind. “Wow. She must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” “Every time he takes off his hat, the woodpeckers chase him!” I think it reflect a sort of odd fusion of Walt’s midwestern slang and Floyd Gottfredson’s own Utah-style – as well as the current slang of Los Angeles, no doubt. Given that in these comic strips, these characters tend to be far more talkative than their on-screen counterparts (no doubt because they didn’t have to be animated and dubbed), there is a sheer volubility in the strips that almost overwhelms you. I felt the urge several times to read the dialogue aloud.

There’s a huge PILE of extras presented here. In addition to the expected biographical detail on Gottfredson, which is fantastic, we get pictures of comic book covers used in European reprints of the cartoons, brief bios of the other inkers and writers involved in the strip, examinations of Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto, and even a 1932 interview with Mickey Mouse that was written up as publicity, along with one in 1931 for Pluto! David Gerstein is already well known for his painstaking detail, but he really goes above and beyond here.

One of the extras presented is the first 2 months of Mickey strips, which were done by Walt and Ub Iwerks. Presented separately here partly as the book is much better off for starting with the high-paced and exciting Race to Death Valley, and partly as it has Mickey battling a bunch of stock cannibals. As the book notes, 1930 is not 2011, and stereotypical racist humor was just something everyone did then, one of the bags of stock gags that writers reached into. So, along with Clarabelle getting the standard ‘female’ gags, and Horace the ‘male’ ones, we also see “uggle biggle boogle” South Seas Island natives. In the main strips, we also get some gypsies, along with Clarabelle and Horace discussing the dichotomy between “They’re just evil and want your money” vs. “Oh, the romantic life they all lead!” that was present in the United States at the time. Naturally, since Mickey needs to battle stock villains, they turn out to be the former in this book. The volume takes pains to note when the strip is getting “politically incorrect”, but does not censor, for which I am grateful, as I would rather experience the prejudices of a different time then simply cover them over.

To sum up, anyone who likes Disney, cartoons, or comic strips will find tons of things to love about this. The comics are exciting adventure strips for the most part, though there’s a lot of standard “gag” stuff as well. Heck, at one point Minnie almost gets ground into paste by a giant pestle thing, something I found far more terrifying than the standard ‘tied to a log headed for a saw” fate of most plucky heroines. A terrific book, highly recommended.

Brief Reviews On Sundry Manga

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I have a pile of backlog here, but can’t quite work up the energy to post a full review for them. Hence these brief thoughts.

My Girlfriend’s a Geek 3: We basically have more of the same here, which is very much what I expected. Taiga deals with his girlfriend’s fetishes as best he can, while getting increasingly exasperated. Introduced here is Yuiko’s cosplaying friend Akari, who turns out to be Kouji’s younger sister. But honestly plot is sort of irrelevant to this series. I did enjoy seeing a brief snippet of Yuiko’s thoughts when she was dealing with the sleazy guy at her office – it shows that she actually does view Taiga as a genuine boyfriend, even if the depth of her feelings for him is still in question. That’s more than I usually get out of Otomen. A bonus at the end of the manga gives us a fake chapter of Sepatte Takuro, Yuiko’s BL obsession, and they even bring in another mangaka to draw it – Hiromi Namiki, who writes the ice hockey manga 88 for Kodansha’s Monthly Shonen Magazine. Unfortunately, the chapter itself is quite dull, being far TOO close a parody of shonen sports manga, to the point where the joke is lost.

Oh My Goddess! 38: We finish off the Chrono arc here, and thank God for that, as it’s one of the weakest in the series to date. Chrono’s fear of cats is incredibly lame, the dojikko maid thing continues to be done to death, and everyone’s praise of her at the end thus seems overdone. On the bright side, once she’s gone we start a new arc that will prove to be more dramatic, as Urd’s mother Hild gets overthrown in Hell by a sneaky trickster, and is now in a chibi body and relatively powerless. What’s worse, now the new demons in charge are arriving on Earth and granting wishes – but as ever, they twist them and make people suffer. I was amused at seeing Chihiro and Megumi actually SEE Hild appear before their eyes, and the building subsequently destroyed – but when the building is magically reconstructed later, they just edit their memories to fit the facts. All in all, not a great volume, but I’m hoping for better things now that Hell has new ownership.

Fairy Tail 13: As ever with Fairy Tail, I enjoy the volume when I’m reading it, but have difficulty retaining any memory of it five minutes after the fact. Erza’s backstory arc gets a bit of an epilogue here, and we see that we probably have not seen the last of Ultear – or Jellal, for that matter. There then follows some goofy comedy as they head back to a now-rebuilt Fairy Tail and welcome Juvia (unsurprisingly) and Gajeel (somewhat more surprisingly) in as members. This mid-section is particularly noted by the cameo appearances by Jason Thompson and Dallas Middaugh, whom Mashima had met when he was a guest at SDCC 2008 and decided to write into the series. Jason in particular makes a great dorky reporter. This is counterbalanced with Lucy’s attempts to use her charms for various purposes – and failing miserably. However, we then head into the next arc, where Laxus returns to town, just as big a jerk and twice as pissed. He and his colleagues decide to have a ‘festival’ where the Fairy Tail members have to fight each other in an elimination bout – and the female members are all turned to stone and used as hostages to make them do it. A sadly predictable plotline, but certainly effective. Fairy Tailo remains good, solid shonen, but I just can’t get into it more than I need to.

Natsume’s Book of Friends 7: Been a while since I reviewed this one. I enjoy the series a great deal, but rarely have much to say about it. This volume is notable for having a plot arc that lasts a good 2/3 of the volume, and features what may prove to be a new ongoing ‘villain’. Someone is attacking yokai in order to get their blood for some unknown purpose – and the attack is human! The main thrust of the plot, however, as with a number of previous chapters, is getting Natsume to be more proactive and choosing to do good, rather than drifting along trying to avoid being hurt. This volume is very much yokai focused – Tanuma and Taki don’t even show up – but that helps, as the whole thing ends up being almost like an action movie. There are a few flaws to the volume – the revelation of the human attacking the yokai turns out to be very anticlimactic, and the unrelated short story at the end is clearly a case of needing to pad out the book, as it’s not that hot. Still, the main story itself is an excellent relaxed shoujo horror, and I look forward to seeing Natsume’s further development.

Butterflies, Flowers Volume 7

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By Yuki Yoshihara. Released in Japan as “Chou Yo Hana Yo” by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Petit Comic. Released in North America by Viz.

I note as I continue to read this series that the reason it succeeds with me in a way that, say, Black Bird does not, is that every horrid moment in it is immediately undercut by some over the top bit of humor or fourth wall breaking that reminds you that this is merely a dumb josei romance. Case in point: continuing where we left off at the end of Vol. 6, Choko has her hand bandaged after Kaori stepped on it in her heels, demanding Choko break up with him. Choko, not one to back down, angrily confronts her the next day at work, whereupon Kaori grabs her hand and sneers “No snitching” while squeezing it hand. A dramatic scene filled with scary tension… until you turn the page, and see superdeformed Choko lying on the floor in a puddle, with a little arrow noting “pissed herself”.

This is perhaps why I didn’t have as much of an issue as some others did with the date rape scene later in the volume. First of all, the moment it “happened” I knew that it would turn out to be something just for show – we’ve known the leads for 6 volumes, and the other man involved for 2, and there just isn’t any way that he would do this sort of thing, and thus it was purely for potboiler show. That said, it was a horrid thing to do, and Masayuki’s response (not immediately telling Choko he knew things didn’t get that far) is equally bad. But then, this is Butterflies, Flowers. If you aren’t ready for the men to be gloriously horrible (but sweet deep down), you’re reading the wrong manga. And again, when she finds out, we cut immediately to Masayuki… who is hiding himself behind her, wearing palm fronds, disguised as a plant.

Then there’s the popularity contest, and the sheer gall of the ex-girlfriend trussed up on the bed like a meat market sale, and Choko’s having to really think back on when the two of them last had sex, and of course the best line of the volume, which I won’t give away here except it involves the word “semen”. Every time something that would be offensive in any other manga comes by, Butterflies, Flowers is here to be so gleefully trashy and over the top that at most you just slap your forehead and sigh.

In terms of the actual couple, Choko gets some good development in the latter half of the book. She’s been, despite the sex, very much the naive and innocent heroine throughout this, and thus when she is confronted by several angry women noting that she’s frustrating Masayuki by her lack of sexual desire for him, she’s not sure what to think. Of course, these girls not only don’t have her prior history with him, but also don’t have him acting like a flaming moron in front of her all the time. But we do start to see Choko think about Masayuki as an actual desirable man, and try her best to understand her own passions. Unfortunately, she doesn’t really get far. Fortunately, the next volume is the final one, so I anticipate that she will soon!

So yes, the sexual politics of this series remains as questionable as ever, but it’s so ludicrous that I don’t care. I like Butterflies Flowers because it’s funny. I dropped Black Bird because it was painfully earnest. Your mileage may vary, but I guess that’s how I see the series. So if you want more of what you’ve seen in the first six volumes, well, you won’t be disappointed.

Oh, you might be disappointed in that there are no Gundam references this time. But they do namedrop Space Battleship Yamato, so I guess it’s OK.