"Reform and Void" in Mickey Mouse #312

IDW's Mickey Mouse #3 (312), regular and subscription cover

I just picked up Mickey Mouse #312 (IDW’s #3). And this time it features one of a series of stories I’ve been waiting for a long time!

After decades of simple gag strips in the daily newspapers, they finally started making serialized Mickey Mouse stories again in the early 90’s. A few are remakes of old Gottfredson stories, but most are new originals. Equal for all is that they are really hard to find! Most are not reprinted in any comic books, at least not in English, and even in the newspapers they are a rare find. I've read most of them as bad newspaper scans found in online newspaper archives, but I’ve been waiting a long time for proper high quality reprint in a comic book. And even if I prefer reading the 30’s and 40’s Gottfredson serials in black and white, the ones from the 90’s looks a lot better colored I think.

One of these stories are printed in Mickey Mouse #312. It’s titled "Reform and Void" and were originally serialized in the newspapers from December 26, 1994 to January 14, 1995.

The story starts with Mickey making a reference to when he used the hypnotic ray on Ecks and Doublex (and Triplex) in "Blaggard Castle".
 

Here is that scene as seen in the original (daily strip December 1, 1933), the remake (daily strip February 15, 1994) and in a summary story in a 1993 Nabisco giveaway.

As in "Reform and Void" Professor Triplex does not appear in the 1994 remake of "Blaggard Castle".

So.. what are the reformed professors up to in this  new story? Well, I’m not going to spoil the entire story in this blog post, so you should go get a copy of Mickey Mouse #312 :) And if you are unfamiliar with the mad professors, go get the Floyd Gottredson Library vol.2 from Fantagraphics too.  That’s a series of books I can highly recommend!

Now, even if I really enjoyed reading "Reform and Void" I do have a little complaint. Personally I think this kind of irregular layout looks really messy. But I definitively would not want the panels to be completely remounted to fit the width of the comic. With the old newspaper strips I guess there’s no other alternative other than printing them other way like Gladstone used to do. But the 90’s strip could fit without having to break up the original strips over several rows, or make them too tiny. They need to be printed a little bit smaller and with a larger gap between each row, but I still think that would look a lot better than the current way of doing it:

To the lef: How IDW did the layout. To the right: How I'd prefer it was done.

  

Also, then they don’t need to cut or change the art at the end to make it fit, like was done this time

To the left: The original panel. To the right: IDW's edit.

 

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A few bonus notes.

The setting of "Reform and Void" is a bit inconsistent with the other sequel to "Blaggard Castle". In "The Perils of Mickey" printed over several Disney Adventures magazines in 1993 and reprinted in the Floyd Gottfredson Library vol 2., the Phantom Blot has a slightly different story about what happened to the professors.

Ecks, Doublex and Triplex are not widely used in Dinsey comcis, and Gottfredson only used them once. Most of the (few) Egmont stories that features the professors already got printed in the USA by Gemstone, but a couple are still only printed in Europe. Here is a sample from the last one printed in Europe, where the professors kidnap Doc Static in a plot to make a robot army.

From a Swedish print of D 2007-413 (En skruv lös)

 One of the other rare newspaper serials from the 90’s features Doctor Doublecross, as seen in “The Riddle of the Runaway Sphinx” (Mickey Mouse Adventures #2, 1990). I really hope we get to see this one and some of the other Mickey serials from the 90’s in future IDW issues!

Daily strip, September 25, 1991

Museums and comics

How do we make a book about history and old artifacts more interesting? We put Disney comics in it of course! That’s what Egmont in Norway did.  In collaboration with two different museums they published books where the first part contains history about and around the objects at the museum, and the second part is Disney comics with the same theme.

The first book is made in collaboration with the Museum of Cultural History, and is about the Vikings. The comics are two of Barks’ longer Donald adventures, The Golden Helmet and Luck of the North. The book is actually available in both Norwegian and English. For anyone interested, the English one is titled Donald Duck in the Wake of the Vikings, ISBN 978-82-429-4853-3

The second book is made together with the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology and is about planes and aero history in Norway. The comic section starts with two airplane stories by Marco Rota, Forced Air-Ace and The Duckburg Air Cup. And then Smoke Writer in the Sky by Carl Barks. Unlike the Viking book, this one is only available in Norwegian as far as I know.

At the very end of the book there’s a fun article comparing all planes found in Carl Barks’ stories with the real-life ones.

British classic in Donald Duck #371

IDW's Donald Duck #4 (#371) - Regular and subscription cover

I got Donald Duck #371 from my local comic shop today. But I won’t talk about the lead story this time, for that you can join the discussion on the translators own blog.

Instead I want to compare the old Mickey Mouse story in this issue to the original print in the British Mickey Mouse Annual.

Mickey Mouse Annual 1937

At first glance they look pretty much identical, only that the IDW print has been colored.

Here’s a photo of the first page if you want to compare with your own copy.

 
The story starts off with some minor dialogue changes and localization:

 But on the last page the changes are more significant. First, there’s a new speech balloon and dialogue for Goofy.

 And the purpose of this new is dialogue is to censor and rewrite the original gag, because in the original Goofy seems to have something completely different in mind for that poor little kitten…

 But the biggest change is in the last panel. Two of the originally four nephews are edited out of the art! Probably because in modern stories Mickey only have two nephews.

I can certainly understand why this gag story had to be censored, and I can understand the reason for attempting to fix a continuity problem with the nephews. Still, I’d rather have these oldies reprinted as close to the original as possible. Or not reprinted at all if they require this kind of editing. I guess the reason for printing the old British gags is mostly to show rare old material to new readers, and not to have a great story told. But I’m not sure IDW succeed in doing that when they make changes like this.

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Mickey’s nephews first appeared in Floyd Gottfredson’s 1932 Sunday serial “Mickey's Nephews “. In that story there are only two of them, and with one exception Gottfredson never used more than two in his comics. The exeption is “Rumplewatt the Giant” a Sunday serial from 1934 that (partly) adapts the 1933 animated short “Giantland”. And that is also the first animated appearances of Mickey’s nephews. But Gottfredson only penciled that story.

In the “Giantland” short we can see 14 nephews, while in “Rumplewatt the Giant” there’s a total of 9.

From the beginning of "Giantland" (1933)

From "Rumplewatt the Giant" (Mar 18, 1934)

 Wilfred Haughton however was happy to use more than two in his comics. And for those reading modern stories wondering where all the other nephews went, Haughton might have a solution for that too! In a 1935 rhyming story he starts off with “Ten little Mickey’s”, then kills them off one by one until two remains, ending the rhyme with “That is only natural, at least there must be two. If we ran out of Mickey kids what would the artist do?”

Page 1 and 5 from "10 Little Mickey Kids", British Mickey Mouse Annual 1935

Quack!

While reading, sorting and indexing my collection of Disney comics, I often come across things I want to share with the world. That could be anything from a quick review of my latest pickup to some tiny little detail that I’m probably the only one who finds interesting. So I finally decided to make a blog where I could post things like that!

It’s probably not going to be any in-depth reviews but more like “hey, check this out!” and sharing fun stuff. I don’t have any real plans for the blog though so who knows what I end up posting. But I’ll try to keep it all related to Disney comics.

I get most Disney stuff currently being published by IDW, collect Norwegian comics and I also used to collect British Disney comics. So there should be more than enough material to blog about, both new and old.