Donald Duck and Incorruptible covers

If you followed American comic releases back in December 2009/January 2010, this might not be new information. But I didn’t notice until today.

Just browsing the web I saw the cover of Incorruptible #1 thinking this looks a lot like a Donald Duck cover I remember! Comparing the A cover for Donald Duck #350 to the premiere issue of Incorruptible they are obviously from the same sketch/idea. Even the background explosion has the same shape.

Looking at the release dates we can throw all doubts aside. Both covers were published by Boom! within a month.

Inside Donald Duck #350 the art is credited to Magic Eye Studio with colors by Andrew Dalhouse while inducks have this corrected to Euclides Miyaura (affiliated with Magic Eye Studio) and colors by Flávio Bezerra.

The first Incorruptible cover is credited to John Cassaday with colors by Laura Marin. But Andrew Dalhouse colored the story inside, which might explain the mixup.

Both covers also have a kind of a follow-up/parody of the original.

A and B cover variants of Donald Duck #350, published by Boom!

Incorruptible #1 and #30, published by Boom!

Mickey Mouse in Night of the Living Text!

Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #733

If you are a Mickey Mouse or Casty fan, you should go and get this week’s issue of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories! While IDW’s regular Mickey-title is on a four-month hiatus and Mickey Mouse Shorts: Season One is being published instead – we still get a great Mickey-story in WDC&S.

Night of the Living Text! is one of the weirdest Mickey-stories I’ve ever read and who other than Casty could come up with this?

The story starts with Goofy trying to organize his comic collection ...in a room that looks almost like the one I’m sitting in right now. So I can relate to his problems!

We also get to know some of Goofy’s favorite titles.
 

But where is Flip the Fish, Goofy’s all-time favorite comic title? After Byron Erickson’s Fantasy Island in the mid 90’s we saw Flip the Fish in a lot of cameo appearances in Egmont stories. I suspect the reason is that the story might have been used as a guide for writers and artists at the time – as we got a change of style in "Egmont Mickey" back then.

From "Fantasy Island" by Byron Erickson and drawn by Ferioli.

But back to Night of the Living Text; after Mickey start seeing captions, the story go crazy. Are they living in a comic book story or what? And how do they get rid of those annoying captions?

Even Pete goes a bit coocoo, with Goofy and Mickey trying to keep up.
 

It’s the weirdest Mickey-story I’ve read in a long time – and definitively worth checking out. And if that isn’t enough craziness for one issue, we also got one of William Van Horn’s strangest stories in WDC&S #733. In Swallowed Whole we have Donald riding a pie while an octopus spray whipped cream in his face – and Daisy have wings.
 

Do I need to say more...

Silly Symphonies vol.1 from IDW

It’s more than two months since IDW published the first volume of their collection of Silly Symphony Sunday comics. But now I have finally found the time to start reading it!

The first volume collects all Sunday pages chronologically from the start in 1932 to the summer of 1935 (and the end of the Cookieland serial). We also get a great introduction article by Disney historian J.B. Kaufmand author of "Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series".  I’ve been trying to get a copy of that book for years, but every time I see one for sale the seller wants a ridiculous amount of money for it. So I’m glad a revised edition is finally being published this autumn, the book is already pre-ordered!

I’ve also been wanting a collection of the Silly Symphony Sunday comics for a long time, so I was really looking forward to this collection from IDW. And the first book does not disappoint! The reproduction quality and coloring are great. As with the Donald Duck Sunday collection the original coloring is used as a guide and there can be some weird looking colors now and then. But I don’t mind that, I think it’s interesting to see how the original coloring was.

Before this book, "Animated Features and Silly Symphonies" published by Abbeville Press in 1980 was the closest we had to a non-translated collection of Silly Symphony Sunday pages.
 

Comparing the two books it’s easy to see the difference in reproduction quality. Especially the coloring in the Abbeville book was too dark and grainy.

The size of IDW's book is the same as their Donald Duck Sunday collection, a little bit wider than the daily strip books. But they all look great together on the shelf.
 

I’m glad this book collects the pages in their original format (that varies throughout the book) including the Lucky Bucks and Mickey Mouse Movies that are not part of the comic stories but were meant to be cut out. But unfortunately not all of the Lucky Bucks are included, just the ones that are replacing panels in the comic page. The usual Sunday package from Kings Features had the Silly Symphony and the Mickey Mouse Sundays together on one page. Some pages (I don’t know how many)* had extra Lucky Bucks included, as can be seen on the newspaper clipping below. To the right is the same page as it appears in IDW’s collection and Fantagraphics’ Floyd Gottfredson collection.
* see comment section below for more information

April 21, 1935 Sunday page in the newspapers (left) and collected by IDW and Fantagraphics (right)

None of the two books have the Lucky Bucks from April 21, 1935 included. I wish they could have been included as a bonus feature somewhere.

But I think all existing Mickey Mouse Movies are included in the first volume of the Silly Symphony collection. To see how they would look without cutting them out of my book, I made these animations: