Mickey Mouse Color Sundays, Vol. 2: Robin Hood Rides Again

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: Color Sundays #2

by Floyd Gottfredson, David Gerstein (Editor), Gary Groth (Editor)

He's faster than a speeding arrow... more powerful than the Sheriff of Nottingham... able to leap high taxes in a single bound! He's Mickey Mouse! He's back in color -- and traveling back in time: battling evil medievals in our second book of Floyd Gottfredson's Sunday classics. Donald Duck, Goofy, and mischievous Morty and Ferdie are invited along too... if they dare! Standout stories in this volume include "The Robin Hood Adventure," in which Mickey joins the Merry Men: swordfighting, jousting, and risking his life to rob the rich! Then Mickey faces Gold Rush gunslingers as the "Sheriff of Nugget Gulch"-- and outwits the ever-sneaky Mortimer Mouse in "Mickey's Rival!" Restored from Studio art sources and enhanced with a meticulous recreation of the strips' original color, Robin Hood Rides Again also includes more than 30 pages of swashbuckling extra features. You'll enjoy coveted non-Mouse Disney comics by Gottfredson; rare behind-the- scenes art; and commentary by a Round Table of Mickey scholars.

Genres: Comics, Humor, Graphic Novels, Collections, Graphic Novels Comics, Comic Strips, Adventure

280 pages, Hardcover

First published October 10, 2013

About the author

Arthur Floyd Gottfredson (1905-1986) was an American cartoonist. He is known for his defining work on the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, which he drew from 1929 to 1975, and mostly plotted himself from 1929 to 1945. His impact on the character of Mickey Mouse is often compared to the one that cartoonist Carl Barks had on Donald Duck. Because of the large international circulation of his strips, reprinted for decades in some European countries like Italy and France, Gottfredson can be seen as one of the most influential cartoonists of the 20th century. Many groundbreaking comic book artists, like Carl Barks and Osamu Tezuka, declared to have been inspired by his work.

Floyd Gottfredson grew up in a Mormon family from Utah. He started drawing as a kid on doctor's advice, as a form of rehabilitation after a sever injury, which left his dominant arm partially disabled for life. After taking some cartooning correspondence courses, teenage Floyd secured a job as cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Telegram.
At age 23, Floyd moved to California with his wife and family. He interviewed at the Disney Studios, hoping to land a position as a comic strip artist, but was hired as in-between animator instead. In that period writer Walt Disney and artist Ub Iwerks were starting a series of daily syndicated newspaper comic strips featuring Mickey Mouse, the character the two had created for animation the year before. A few months into the publication of the strips however, Iwerks left the Studios. Walt decided then to promote Gottfredson to the role of Mickey Mouse strip penciler, remembering his original request at the job interview. Not long after that, Disney left the entire process of creation of the strip to Gottfredson, who would eventually become head of a small 'comic strips department' within the Disney Studios.
Up to 1955, Mickey's strips were 'continuity adventures': the strips were not just self-contained gags, but they composed long stories that would stretch in the newspapers for months. In this context, Gottfredson had to developed Mickey's personality way beyond his animation counterpart. He made him an adventurer and multi-tasking hero, putting him in all kind of settings and genre-parodies: thriller, sci-fi, urban comedy, adventure in exotic lands, war stories, western, and so on.
Gottfredson scripted the stories on his own for a few years, only getting help for the inking part of the process. (Most notably by Al Taliaferro, who will become himself the main artist on the Silly Symphonies and Donald Duck syndicated strips.) Starting from around 1932, Gottfredson worked with various writers, mostly Ted Osbourne and Merril deMarris, who provided scripts for the strips, while Floyd retained the role of plotter and penciler. Starting from 1945, Gottfredson left all writing duties to writer Bill Wash.
In 1955, by request of the Syndicate, Mickey Mouse strips stopped being continuous stories, and became self-contained gag. Gottfredson would remain in his role of strip artist for twenty more years, up to his retirement in 1975.
Gottfredson died in 1986, with his achievements going mostly unknown to the larger American public (as his strips were technically all signed 'Walt Disney').
In 2006, twenty years after his death, Floyd Gottfredson was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Hall of Fame.

Reviews

[LadyS · Rating 4 out of 5]

ahh it took me right back to them Childhood days when on the weekends, I would race with my sister to obtain the "then free newspaper" which always contained a comic section. Mickey mouse Color Sundays was a delight to read from start to finish. It included side stories of snow white, sleeping beauty and robin hood. The pictures were vivid, the stories entertaining and it was just overall delightful!!

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I though this book was pretty good. It is a collection of a lot of old Disney comic strips. Many of them were funny but some did not really make sense. Also, I enjoyed the classic tale ones and thought they were mostly done well but there were some places that they seemed really slow and others where it seemed like it jumped through the story rather quickly. Overall though I enjoyed this book and it is a great read for Disney fans, especially if they really enjoy the older Disney stuff.

[Mrbico]

Read

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was somewhat disappointing. For one thing, a good chink of the book isn't actually Gottfredson Mouse stuff, as he didn't do enough Sunday strips really to fill two books. Some of the extra stuff is later Gottfredson work, in the form of newspaper strip adaptations of a few Disney films--Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmations, a couple of others--but this is generic-looking work, Gottfredson's uniqueness and spark buried beneath bland disney house style. On the other hand, even some of the mouse stuff isn't really Gottfredson. The "Brave Tailor" story line actually wasn't drawn by Gottfredson but was ghosted. Not that it's badly done or anything, but it's not what the book purports to give us. Even the Gottfredson Mouse stuff, though, is . . . well, it's fine, I guess, but it really lacks the punch of the daily stories. A lot of the strips are gag-oriented, which is fine, except that the gags aren't generally real thigh-slappers. The longer narratives just don't feel developed of fleshed out the way the daily continuities do. They're generally lighter in tone--agaion, not that there's antything wrong with that, unless you prefer Mickey the humorous adventure hero to Mickey the light comedy hero. Needless to say, though, the book is lovingly produced, with high reproduction standards and decent editorial content.

[Kaoru · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second (and final) collection of Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse Sunday strips. And while the single page gags are funnier than in the first volume and the longer storylines are more ambitious it seemed strangely weaker, even though I can't quite work out why this is. However what DID sour my enjoyment of the book where the last 80 pages or so. Since there wasn't enough Mickey Mouse material to fill the book, they tacked on some Disney movie- and short-adaptations that Gottfredson did later in his career. You can either see that as a nice and interesting bonus - or as landfill to pad out the pages. And I'm afraid yours truly tends more towards the latter, as those adaptations are really rather pedestrian and little more than comic archeology at best. One has to wonder why they just didn't do one single fat volume with only the Sunday strips in the first place.

As a whole I recommend that you better stick with the daily strip collections and that you only bother with these Sunday strips in case you're a nutty completist just as I am.

[Ruz El · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one finishes up Gottfredsons run on the Sunday strips, and it's a bit of a whimper. These (mostly) gag strips just don't hold a candle to the daily adventure strips that he is known for. It's still a fun read though, and the volume is the typical top quality that Fantagraphics is known for.

[Sarvesh]

The humor was hilaious