The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (9 page)

Despite his artistic skill and dedication, Gottfredson never held his early work in high esteem. In a 1967 interview, he remarked:

In the 1930s, Mickey’s figure construction-wise was crude, anatomically bad, bumpy, stodgy. There was no flow in composition; the design wasn’t there. For me, I shudder to look at the work I did during that period. I just don’t like to look back on any of my work done more than six months ago. In fact, I wouldn’t ever want to see it reprinted. I think it’s aged too much.

Gottfredson retired on October 1, 1975, and passed away at the age of 81 on July 22, 1986. Roman Arambula and various other artists took over the artwork for the strip through 1989.

In January 1990, the Mickey Mouse comic strip became a “semi-continuing” strip, meaning that the gag-a-day format alternated with short-story continuities.

From September 1, 1958, through March 17, 1962, there was another daily Mickey Mouse comic strip that ran concurrently with the regular strip entitled
Mickey Mouse and His Friends
. It used a gag-a-day format with no dialog balloons or captions. Disney felt that such a pantomime strip would be easier to sell overseas because there were no translation issues.

Originally, the strip was written by Milt Banta with artwork by Ken Hultgren. In 1959, Manuel Gonzales and Riley Thomson did the art. By May 1959, Roy Williams was doing the gags and Julius Svendsen the drawing.

Despite the contributions of many talented writers and artists, the daily Mickey Mouse comic strip, like all newspaper comic strips, faded in popularity as readers abandoned print media and as the reproduction of the artwork shrank to miniscule scale.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Disney’s contract with King Features ended, and the strip was cancelled.

Artist and author Floyd Norman, the last writer on the Mickey Mouse comic strip, said:

With Mickey Mouse in fewer than thirty newspapers, both companies realized that Mickey’s time was nearing the end of a long and successful run. Over the year the Mickey strip had grown old and stodgy. The strip was not funny, nor was it allowed to be funny. With scrappy little Mickey reduced to an animated Ozzie Nelson it was no wonder the strip was on its last legs.

I don’t think anybody even noticed the strip was no longer being published. Times had changed and media had seen a revolution. Yet, I think Mickey could have survived the revolution had we only had creative leadership that would allow us to take the mouse in a bold new direction (of short adventure stories like in the early days). Personally, I think Mickey would have survived. However, this is something we’ll probably never know.

He started drawing the Mickey Mouse comic strip on May 5, 1930, and drew his last Sunday strip on September 19, 1976, and his last daily strip on November 15, 1976.

In 2011, Fantagraphics Publications began releasing a multi-volume prestige format book series with reprints of Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse comic strip. Edited by Mickey Mouse expert David Gerstein and publisher Gary Groth, the books contain not only the comic strips themselves but important and entertaining supplemental material. When the first volume was released in 2011, Gerstein said:

Instead of seeing Mickey as a cheerful, but one-dimensional character — like a lot of people do — Gottfredson portrayed him as this stubbornly optimistic, determined, two-fisted young guy trying to prove himself in wild, adventurous situations. Floyd called Mickey “a mouse against the world.”

Mickey’s brave, witty, imaginative and incredibly daring in Gottfredson’s stories. He’s a scrapper, ready to fight for what he believes in; but he’s not always right about what he thinks is right, so he can create a mess for himself and have to do some great soul-searching afterwards.

Gottfredson’s work influenced many artists. He once recalled:

I’ve always felt that it was our job to try to capture the spirit of animation… I tried to design the characters as if they were moving in animation.

I interviewed Floyd Gottfredson in fall 1979 for an article, “The Mouse Man”, that I wrote in issue #6 of the Disney-oriented fanzine,
The Duckburg Times
.

I later used some of the interview for a series of introductions that I wrote for the
UnCensored Mouse
comic book collections that reprinted early public domain Mickey Mouse comic strips. That short-lived project was published by Malibu Graphics in 1989.

KORKIS: How did you decide to apply at the Disney Studios?

GOTTFREDSON
: Looking for another job, I went to Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, California, where all the film exchanges were and one of them had a one-sheet Mickey Mouse movie poster standing in front of it. As a projectionist in Utah, I had run all of Walt’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit animated cartoons so I was familiar with the Disney name but I had never seen or heard of Mickey Mouse before.

Out of curiosity, I went in and the fellow o Vand I started talking and he told me he had heard that Walt was going to New York the following week to look for artists. I lost no time in putting together my samples and rushing out to the Disney Studio which was then located on Hyperion Avenue. I figured I would get the jump on the fellows who might be applying in New York since I was already there in Los Angeles.

Korkis: Did you get to meet Walt?

Gottfredson
: Walt himself looked over my samples and asked me what sort of work I was interested in doing and I told him I wanted to do comic strips. Well, at that time, Disney wasn’t doing any comic strips. Walt was quite a salesman. He told me I didn’t want to get involved in doing comic strips because it was a rat race.

He said that the future would be animation and he was so convincing that I said, “Fine. Do you have any openings in animation?” And he said, “Sure, we’ll put you in as an in-betweener.”

Then he said that he and Ub Iwerks were just beginning to put together a Mickey Mouse comic strip for King Features and that it would be good to have me around as a back-up man in case they needed some help.

Korkis: Did you start working at Disney immediately?

Gottfredson
: I went to work the following day, December 19, 1929. I was 24 years old and had been married for five years. I had been earning $65 a week as a projectionist and Walt was offering $18 a week but I took it because he had really convinced me that animation was the future. I did some free-lance cartooning on the side by mail and within eight months I was making more than I made as a projectionist. 

Korkis: What did you do as an in-betweener?

Gottfredson
: I only worked about four months in animation as an in-betweener. I did in-between work for Johnny Cannon and later Dave Hand and Wilfred Jackson. I even did a few in-betweens for Ub Iwerks.

It was all work for the
Silly Symphonies
. Norm Ferguson and Dave Hand gave me a little piece of animation to do on Cannibal Capers (1930). It was a lion running out of the jungle and a cannibal beating on a drum. That was really the only animation I ever did but it worked out pretty well and I was just fascinated with animation.

Korkis: How did you finally end up with the Mickey Mouse comic strip?

Gottfredson
: The Mickey Mouse comic strip debuted in January 13, 1930, with Walt doing the writing and Ub penciled them and an artist named Win Smith was doing the inking. After the first eighteen strips, Ub left and Win took over the penciling and the inking. The strip was straight gags adapted from the Mickey Mouse movie cartoons.

King Features wanted continuity, that is to say, they wanted the strip to have a story and a plot because other strips like Sidney Smith’s
The Gumps
were very popular being “story strips”. Walt tried to convince Win to take over the writing and Win kept stalling but I don’t know why. Finally, Walt met with him and told him he was going to take over the writing and Win who had a short fuse wasn’t going to be told what to do and so he quit. He came by my desk and said, “I think you’ve got a new job”.

Korkis: So it was as simple as that?

Gottfredson
: About a half hour later, Walt called me into his office and asked me whether I would like to take over doing the strip. By now I had become very interested in animation and was reluctant to change. I told Walt that he was right and that I would prefer to stay with animation. Well, Walt was quite a salesman. He told me to just take the strip for two weeks to give him some time to find anh�tist.

I wanted to help out so I agreed. After all, he had told me that part of my job was to be a possible back-up on the strip. At the end of a month, I wondered if he was really seriously looking for anyone. After two months, I began to worry that he might actually find someone because I was enjoying doing it and wanted to continue with it.

Nothing more was ever said about it and I continued to draw the Mickey daily strip for about forty-five and a half years until my retirement on October 1, 1975.

Korkis: When did your first strip appear?

Gottfredson
: My first strip appeared May 5, 1930, and the strip had gone into continuities April 1, 1930. Walt had written a story about Mickey finding a treasure map to a gold mine in Death Valley. To help me get started, Walt continued to write about two weeks’ worth of strips for me to draw and then I took over the writing on May 19 in the middle of the story and continued to write the daily until 1932 when five different writers took over writing the continuities.

Korkis: How closely did the comic strip follow the animated cartoons?

Gottfredson
: We tried to follow the spirit of the Mickey animated cartoons but because we were doing adventure stories we had to go beyond them. The animated cartoons had just a loose story structure where there could be a lot of gags building to a conclusion.

That isn’t how stories are done in newspaper strips. We had to develop the characters more to help sustain the story. I loved doing these little adventures but keeping them as humorous as possible. Straight gags are too thin. Not enough meat to them. I think going back to gag-a-day was a step backwards and I think this was proved by the drop in popularity of the strip.

Korkis: Weren’t some of your early strips influenced by Mickey’s animated adventures?

Gottfredson
: Walt himself set the precedent for borrowing ideas from the cartoons. The strip was influenced by the cartoons but also the fads and movies of the day.
The Mad Doctor
influenced the strip story “Mickey Mouse in Blaggard Castle”, although the mad professors in our story were modeled after a Boris Karloff movie I had just seen. 

“Mickey and the Seven Ghosts” was inspired by the animated cartoon
Lonesome Ghosts
. “Mickey Mouse Runs His Own Newspaper” was inspired by the gangster movies of the time like
Scarface
and
Little Caesar
. 

Korkis: Did you ever run into the same censorship issues that Walt was facing with the animated cartoons?

Gottfredson
: There was one sequence in the “Blaggard Castle” story where Mickey grabs a pole and vaults over this alligator pit but as he is leaping, the pole breaks. King Features sent us a frantic telegram that they were going to cut out the entire sequence because the alligators would upset women and children reading the newspaper.

I took the photostats to Walt and he just laughed. He thought it was a good adventure and was confident that we had a way of making the resolution of the peril humorous. So he contacted the syndicate and they left it in.

We also got censored when we did the “Monarch of Medioka” story because it kind of paralleled what was actually happening in Yugoslavia at that time where the archduke was trying to overthrow the king. Over the years, there was very little censorship because our goal was to try to stay true to the spirit of Disney animation.

Korkis: Did Walt have to approve your work before it was sent to the syndicate?

Gottfredson
lt checked my work for the first couple of months after I took over the strip, but after that and all through the years, except to pass on an occasional suggestion, he very seldom concerned himself with the strip or the department.

He seemed relieved not to have to be concerned with them. He had bigger things to worry about. We were just supposed to follow the general studio rule that any violence was to be done in a comedic manner. And we labored over the artwork to make it the highest quality we could.

Korkis: So Walt had no direct input into the direction of the strip?

Gottfredson
: In the early days of the strip, I was always intrigued by details in the background like houses and picket fences and rain spouts. So one of the hardest things I had to learn was to simplify, to streamline. In the first couple of months that I worked on the strip, I would take the strips personally to Walt in his office for his approval.

Later, as I said, he became too busy to take the time to do that or maybe he just felt I was doing okay. I do know he would still look at the proof sheets closely because sometimes I would get memos but that was usually about any changes that was going to happen in animation that we needed to do in strips.

The only direct input I would get from Walt was that I was putting in too much “junk” in the strip. “Why do you put so much junk in there? Simplify.” I don’t know if that was to help the storytelling or because of his experience in animation where you didn’t want the background too complicated.

One time when he was in Florida, he sent me a copy of the strip that had appeared in the local paper and he wrote in the margin “Too damn much junk. Clean it up.” Still, that is pretty good if that is the only complaint I would get from him. Looking back on those old strips, I think the old stories were too wordy and overloaded with dialogue.

Korkis: I notice your Mickey Mouse continues to change his look over the decades. Some people even thought a different artist was doing the strip at times.