One of the great tragedies of the American comic marketplace is that there are fewer and fewer avenues for young children to discover and delight in the medium. For a medium forever viewed from the outside as being ‘for children’, the truth is that young readers might have the least access to truly great cartooning.
Fantagraphics looks to widen that access point with their new Disney books, which promise to tap what seems to be the inexhaustible well of talent that has been producing comics about the great Disney characters outside the United States for decades.
Fantagraphics
In Mickey Mouse #1 (#331 in legacy numbering), Fantagraphics imports three great Mouseton adventures, two of which are seeing US publication for the first time in these pages.
The main story, “The Phantom Blot’s Double Revenge”, was initially published in the Italian comics magazine Topolino back in 2005. Written by Andrea “Casty” Castellan and illustrated by Roberto Vian, the story exemplifies the sort of big adventures Mickey Mouse regularly undertakes under the skilled hands of European craftspeople. It’s a wild story, dealing with classic Mickey baddie, The Phantom Blot, creating a cloning device, and flooding Mouseton with duplicates of its citizens. Hijinks ensue, but Mickey and Goofy are hot on the trail.
“I Scream, You Scream”, also from Topolino, is a brief Super Goof gag strip by Simone “Sio” Albrigi and Stefano Intini, and features a delightfully kinetic art style. It’s a quick, hyperactive series of classic Super Goof misunderstandings.
Fantagraphics
Sandwiched in between these more modern stunners is “There’s Many a Slip. . .”, where the publisher shows its true historian colors. A classic 1933 strip by one of the great Mickey Mouse cartoonists, Floyd Gottfredson (along with Ted Osborne), “Slip” pointedly sums up Fantagraphics’ end mission: to fully explore the immeasurable wealth of Disney comics as much as possible, disregarding region, popularity, or age.
Mickey Mouse #1, with its whopping 40 pages of adventure and grade-A talent, looks to answer for that lack of children’s comics, and it does so with an academic eye for curation. This first issue speaks volumes about the quality that readers (of any age) can expect from the entire Fantagraphics/Disney lineup going forward. These are children’s comics with heart, integrity, and they celebrate the best and most adventuresome aspects of some of the world’s most recognizable cartoon creations. For a book to speak so directly to both comics-curious children and dusty old comics historians seems like an impossible – and celebratory – feat.
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