Of mouse and men (MM 90th birthday thread!)
Nov 30, 2018 14:47:57 GMT
Huwey, Rrr, and 1 more like this
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Nov 30, 2018 14:47:57 GMT
So, I conclude my three parts post, talking about my relation with Mickey's comics.
3) The comic hero. When I was five my mum gave me a one year subscription to Chip'n'Dale, a pre-school Disney comics publication that was around in the late 80's and 90's. That may have been my first encounter with comics, as far as I can remember. But the first serious reading of my life - not just in the form of comics, really the first thing that I have read on my own, books in prose included - was ... Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson! I was seven years old and I had a school diary with one of his strips per page/day. Now, it is hard to remember which stories were there, I think The Monarch of Medioka and The Plumber's Helper, probably Bellhop Detective too. Hard to say exactly, since always as a child I read many other Gottfredson's stories from books that I typically found on the bookshelves in my relatives's houses. (Yep! In Italy Gottfredson was relatively easy to find, because so many of his stories were republished every seven/eight years.) Today, when reading the Fantagraphic Library I unexpectedly find myself thinking in the middle of some story "Hey, wait a sec! I already know this Mickey story! But I did not remember it!".
I also read Topolino in those days, but was not fully satisfied. Those modern Disney comics were not as good as the old ones that I knew. Also, despise the name of the magazine, in the middle of the 90's most issues of Topolino were 100% filled up with duck comics, which I did not like as much. (In those days Barks and Rosa were published in another magazine, Zio Paperone, which I did not read...) My hero Mickey appeared too rarely in his own magazine! Also, I had a strange relationship with Faraci's stories, which started to appear when I was ten: they were almost perfect, on another level compared to any other thing published in the magazine. Normally I would only know the name of the artists, but he was the only writer whose name I remembered. But his stories had one giant flaw: Mickey appeared only in a few panels, or at all! I remember getting kinda angry while thinking "why this genius is not using Mickey instead of focusing on
Casey and the other stupid cops of the Mouseton PD?" (Eventually he did use Mickey, but by that time I was already twelve years old and was starting to loose interest in comics.)
My frustration with the low presence of my comic hero was mitigated when I discovered Topomistery (sic, not "mystery"), a monthly series that republished stories where Mickey was a detective. Finally some 200 pages per month with only my hero with parabolic ears! Now, a lot of Italian crap from the 70's appeared in this comic book. But also good stories. In particular, every month there was a strip story by Walsh from the late 40's or 50's, i.e. the ones less republished up to that moment. Also, I discovered Scarpa in this series, and as I have written elsewhere in this forum reading Kali's Nail at the age of ten was one of the great cultural shocks of my life. The moment when I understood that comics are something of value.
At the age of 12 and for most of my teenage I lost interest in comics in general. I went back to read comics - mostly graphic novels - from around the age of eighteen. But never wanted to go back to Mickey comics, not even by Gottfredson. Every now and then I read some story by this one famous Casty that I found in someone else's Topolino, but without much interest or enthusiasm. When the fist library of Gottfredson was published in Italy I was more or less twenty-four. But I consciously decided not to buy it. Why? Well, because Gottfredson's mouse (and Scarpa's, and Faraci's) was a nice memory of my childhood which I did not want to ruin with the eyes of an adult, now used to be entertained by (supposely) "more mature" stuff. My great passion for Gottfredson - and then by a chain effect to other Mickey Mouse writers - was relighted only by the Fantagraphic library. I step on the first volume in a comic shop, right in the days when I was starting a new life all alone in the big capital of a big foreign country, surrounded by people who spoke a language that I did not even understand. The curiosity of seeing some of those strips in the original form, and the challenge of reading them in that weird English pushed me to buy the volume. The beauty of the material and the high quality of the essays pushed me to keep buying the following volumes in the series. And here I am now writing this stuff. (So yes, if I am here it is also because of Ramapith 's nice work!)
To conclude, Gottfredson's stories laid the foundations of my experience as a reader since an early age. In particular, they set my unconscious approach to comedy in comics: when I read humor comics, my mind seems to always look for that kind of mixure of adventure and comedy, that rhythm of storytelling, that high density of gags. In a way, I feel that it is the fault of Gottfredson if my bar is set relatively high when it comes to funny comics: typically you have to feed me something like a good old Asterix album written by a comic genius like Goscinny to fully satisfy me!
Also, Gottfredson's pie-eyed Mickey from the 30's became my prototype of hero, to an extent that lasts today. That bizarre balance between being an actual hero - able to accomplish great deeds in a brave and generous way - and at the same time being a self-conscious parody of the myth of the hero is ultimately what makes him so dear to my heart.
3) The comic hero. When I was five my mum gave me a one year subscription to Chip'n'Dale, a pre-school Disney comics publication that was around in the late 80's and 90's. That may have been my first encounter with comics, as far as I can remember. But the first serious reading of my life - not just in the form of comics, really the first thing that I have read on my own, books in prose included - was ... Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson! I was seven years old and I had a school diary with one of his strips per page/day. Now, it is hard to remember which stories were there, I think The Monarch of Medioka and The Plumber's Helper, probably Bellhop Detective too. Hard to say exactly, since always as a child I read many other Gottfredson's stories from books that I typically found on the bookshelves in my relatives's houses. (Yep! In Italy Gottfredson was relatively easy to find, because so many of his stories were republished every seven/eight years.) Today, when reading the Fantagraphic Library I unexpectedly find myself thinking in the middle of some story "Hey, wait a sec! I already know this Mickey story! But I did not remember it!".
I also read Topolino in those days, but was not fully satisfied. Those modern Disney comics were not as good as the old ones that I knew. Also, despise the name of the magazine, in the middle of the 90's most issues of Topolino were 100% filled up with duck comics, which I did not like as much. (In those days Barks and Rosa were published in another magazine, Zio Paperone, which I did not read...) My hero Mickey appeared too rarely in his own magazine! Also, I had a strange relationship with Faraci's stories, which started to appear when I was ten: they were almost perfect, on another level compared to any other thing published in the magazine. Normally I would only know the name of the artists, but he was the only writer whose name I remembered. But his stories had one giant flaw: Mickey appeared only in a few panels, or at all! I remember getting kinda angry while thinking "why this genius is not using Mickey instead of focusing on
Casey and the other stupid cops of the Mouseton PD?" (Eventually he did use Mickey, but by that time I was already twelve years old and was starting to loose interest in comics.)
My frustration with the low presence of my comic hero was mitigated when I discovered Topomistery (sic, not "mystery"), a monthly series that republished stories where Mickey was a detective. Finally some 200 pages per month with only my hero with parabolic ears! Now, a lot of Italian crap from the 70's appeared in this comic book. But also good stories. In particular, every month there was a strip story by Walsh from the late 40's or 50's, i.e. the ones less republished up to that moment. Also, I discovered Scarpa in this series, and as I have written elsewhere in this forum reading Kali's Nail at the age of ten was one of the great cultural shocks of my life. The moment when I understood that comics are something of value.
At the age of 12 and for most of my teenage I lost interest in comics in general. I went back to read comics - mostly graphic novels - from around the age of eighteen. But never wanted to go back to Mickey comics, not even by Gottfredson. Every now and then I read some story by this one famous Casty that I found in someone else's Topolino, but without much interest or enthusiasm. When the fist library of Gottfredson was published in Italy I was more or less twenty-four. But I consciously decided not to buy it. Why? Well, because Gottfredson's mouse (and Scarpa's, and Faraci's) was a nice memory of my childhood which I did not want to ruin with the eyes of an adult, now used to be entertained by (supposely) "more mature" stuff. My great passion for Gottfredson - and then by a chain effect to other Mickey Mouse writers - was relighted only by the Fantagraphic library. I step on the first volume in a comic shop, right in the days when I was starting a new life all alone in the big capital of a big foreign country, surrounded by people who spoke a language that I did not even understand. The curiosity of seeing some of those strips in the original form, and the challenge of reading them in that weird English pushed me to buy the volume. The beauty of the material and the high quality of the essays pushed me to keep buying the following volumes in the series. And here I am now writing this stuff. (So yes, if I am here it is also because of Ramapith 's nice work!)
To conclude, Gottfredson's stories laid the foundations of my experience as a reader since an early age. In particular, they set my unconscious approach to comedy in comics: when I read humor comics, my mind seems to always look for that kind of mixure of adventure and comedy, that rhythm of storytelling, that high density of gags. In a way, I feel that it is the fault of Gottfredson if my bar is set relatively high when it comes to funny comics: typically you have to feed me something like a good old Asterix album written by a comic genius like Goscinny to fully satisfy me!
Also, Gottfredson's pie-eyed Mickey from the 30's became my prototype of hero, to an extent that lasts today. That bizarre balance between being an actual hero - able to accomplish great deeds in a brave and generous way - and at the same time being a self-conscious parody of the myth of the hero is ultimately what makes him so dear to my heart.