Mickey Mouse comic about evil elf?

[pimiko]

I'm looking for a Mickey Mouse comic I read when I was a kid. Basically, there was this Rumpelstiltskin-like elf character who had magical powers and used them to mock Mickey and his friends by turning them into various stuff like cavemen, animals, etc.

In the end the elf gets defeated by Minnie (I think), who makes him recite some sentence backwards, which returns him to his own dimension.

Anyone know what comic this is? Or the elf character's name?

[The KKM]

do you have more info, like, where was it published, how the art looked like, etc?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

That definitely reminds me of something. Incidentally, the character is pretty clearly a tribute to the Superman imp character, you know, Mr [Impronouncable String of Consonants I Can Never Remember].

[Ramapith]

The elf character is the Imp from the Eleventh Dimension (as far as I know, no other name is ever given). He's in half a dozen stories, some of which have appeared in the English language comics.

[pimiko]

Thank you. The story in question is "An Impish Bad Birthday".

[Mesterius]

The classic Superman villain that the Imp is based on is, of course, Mister Mxyzptlk. And just like Mxyzptlk, the Imp has to be defeated by being tricked into saying something backwards (in the case of Mxyzptlk, his own name). 

Have to admit, this is one of the things I didn't like so much about the Egmont Mickey stories that were produced when I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s: often, it felt like they were ripping off something else in popular culture a little too blatantly.

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Jan 16, 2019 10:10:36 GMT Mesterius said:

 
Have to admit, this is one of the things I didn't like so much about the Egmont Mickey stories that were produced when I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s: often, it felt like they were ripping off something else in popular culture a little too blatantly.

I suppose that's what happens when you take three or four random writers, you show them three or four random Gottfredson's stories, and then you tell them "now you do it!". As far as I have read, Egmont's Mickey Mouse looks to me like a failed attempt to create a comics tradition almost out of the blue, starting from a few vague ideas taken from strips from the 30's without much context. The result is weird at best. Mickey Mouse by Egmont feels like a talking marchandise mascotte to me. I know that Gerstein and Erickson are knowledgeable MM world-class expert, but they did not wrote most of the stories produced by Egmont. (And their MM is probably not immune to the aformentioned critic, I guess.)
In my view Mickey Mouse is - and has been for fifty years now - only an Italian comics character, for better or for worse. I mean that the Italian Mickey is the one that has evolved in a continuous way starting from the one of Gottfedson and Walsh. It does not mean that Italian writers have always taken Mickey right or have him evolved in a coherent way (for decades they have actually done disasters!). Yet with their roots in the tradition - or at least in a tradition - they always have the tools to correct their steps and improve on the character and his world. This sense of continuity that you feel when reading an Italian MM story is what lacks most in the Danish-produced (mostly American-written) stories.  

Even if the situation is different, for a similar reason Fethry Duck feels to me more real in Italian stories than in his rare Egmont appearances. Yes, the Italian Fethry is way out-of-character compared to the original by Kinney, while the resurrected Egmont one tries to be more inline with his original behaviour. But the supposedly out-of-character one in Italian stories lies above forty years of almost weekly appearances. And I do not know why, maybe it is a delusion due to me growing up in Italy, but I kinda feel that when I read an Italian duck story. 

No judgment involved in these considerations. To me the average Italian disney comics story, from the past or from the present, sucks more or less as much as the average Danish or Dutch story.