1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Mickey and Horace, February 23, 2012
This review is from: Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: "Trapped on Treasure Island" (Vol. 2) (Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse) (Hardcover)
For those of us who are getting along in years these Mickey and Horace stories are a breath of nostalgic fresh air. This is Mickey Mouse in this younger, wilder years; before Walt decided to tame him down to a point of being simply a good natured logo for Walt Disney Productions.Todays kids might have a hard time, at first, relating to the rougher drawn characters; but to those my age, this is the REAL Mickey Mouse. I'm sure that even the younger readers will be swiftly drawn into these amazing adventures of this famous mouse. Highly recommended.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fantastic Collection with Some Flaws, October 26, 2011
This review is from: Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: "Trapped on Treasure Island" (Vol. 2) (Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse) (Hardcover)
In Volume 1 readers got a glimpse of the famous Mouse prior to his becoming a corporate logo. I was tremendously impressed by Floyd Gottfredson's work as well as Fantagraphics fantastic presentation and gave the book an unequivocal five stars. With volume 2 I start to equivocate.
Mickey has evolved into the now familiar unimpeachable good guy. I would contrast him with his contemporary Popeye the Sailor who, like Mickey and many depression era heroes, had a soft spot for widows and orphans. Unlike Mickey, his altruistic bent went hand in hand with some serious character flaws most notably a violent often uncontrollable temper. Mickey, on the other hand, is nearly perfect. Where Popeye would often find his attempts at good deeds blowing up in his face Mickey's goodness invariably turns out well but it was the multidimensionality of Popeye that made him such an interesting character. In addition to having characters flaws Popeye was also legitimately funny and Elzie Segar leveraged Popeye's uniqueness for all its worth. It's not that Gottfredson is incapable of humor it's that I don't think he is trying to make Mickey or Minnie humorous. Mickey is a good guy end of story. The only characters who are actually funny are Clarabelle, Horace Horsecollar and Dippy Dawg a.k.a. Goofy (who is actually very funny).
The other issue is that when Mickey comes out on top it often isn't so much because of his determination and grit but through sheer dumb luck. In the first story Mickey tries to raise money for orphans and starts walking the streets with a sandwich board soliciting donations. He spots a flyer for a contest offering $50 cash for the best homemade glider when suddenly a gust of winds turns his sandwich board 90 degrees turning them essentially into wings, lofts him in the air and deposits him at the contest just in time to accept the prize. This kind of stuff happens all through the book. When Mickey is stuck far from home and needs to return quickly he just comes across a gassed up ready to go "abandoned" plane. When that plane gets wrecked he finds a pilot who happens to be flying where Mickey is going. Apparently Gottfredson wrote Mickey to be a Horatio Alger type hero but like the heroes from Alger's books Mickey's pluck was only the lead in to a series of amazing strokes of luck.
I enjoyed this book but not as much as volume 1. Gottfredson seems to have taken a step backwards using a lot of cliché's (and some unfortunate moments of racism) so common to the 1930's that make some of the stories feel dated. He's also taken Mickey away from the simple depression era mouse. In the first story Peg Leg Pete and Sylvester S. steal a sack of money from orphans but by the fourth story the duo put together a plan worthy of the most audacious Bond villain. In the story "Blaggard Castle" Mickey and Horace foil a plan for world domination and possibly genocide. Quite a departure from Mickey's early fight with Kat Nip.
None of this is to say I didn't enjoy this book immensely. Gottfredson is a wonderful artist and an archetypical good guy can be entertaining in his/her simplicity. There is very little depth to Mickey Mouse but you can't fault him for being unreliable. Mickey would never have had such an enduring appeal if people didn't like his unswerving wholesomeness and this was probably exactly the type of figure that many during the depression were looking for when people were desperate for something good, stable and predictable. You could always count on Mickey Mouse to do what's good. Fantagraphics has probably put together the best collection from one of the all time greatest comic writers and despite any complaints I wouldn't hesitate to pick up another volume.
Postscript: In case you're wondering why I used the name Sylvester S. to refer to Peg Leg Pete's cohort rather than the name that is defined as a crooked lawyer and why I still won't use it it's because it's actually among Amazon's list of swear words and my review won't get posted if I use it. Weird.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Handles some ticklish material well, November 25, 2011
This review is from: Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: "Trapped on Treasure Island" (Vol. 2) (Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse) (Hardcover)
Volume 2 of Fantagraphics' GOTTFREDSON LIBRARY, which takes us up through the beginning of 1934, maintains the high production standards and copious ancillaries of the first volume. Its most signature achievement, however, is the delicacy with which it defuses the explosive racial stereotypes that litter "The Great Orphanage Robbery" and "Treasure Island," the two lengthy stories that take up much of 1932. "Presentist" hand-wringing and moral preening is kept to a minimum, and the black caricatures -- the "Uncle Tom" costumes that our heroes don to raise funds in "Orphanage Robbery," the incongruously Southern-accented cannibals of "Treasure Island" -- are "explained" and placed in historical context in a straightforward fashion.
As GeoX's exhaustive analysis of "Orphanage Robbery" makes clear, that story's cachet has mostly to do with the "notorious" blackface bits; the story itself is "bitty" and constructed in a rather ramshackle fashion, with a bizarrely cruel edge to boot. (It'll be hard for me to rip on the ineptitude of the police forces of Duckburg and St. Canard in the future after seeing what passed for "justice" in 1932 Mouseton.) "Treasure Island" isn't much better, but, as that story draws to an end, the classic MICKEY strip of the 30s literally begins to take shape with the arrival of Ted Thwaites as Gottfredson's inker. For some reason, Thwaites has not yet been included among those creators who rate mini-bios in the back of the book. I certainly hope that this oversight is remedied in the next volume, for the "slicker" look of the post-1932 MICKEY owes quite a bit to Thwaites.
"Blaggard Castle," with its ante-upping themes of mind control, madness, murder, and would-be world domination, is rightly flagged as a turning point in terms of the strip's being able to handle more "serious" themes. A few seams, like those in the Frankenstein monster's neck, still show; what good would it do for mad Professors Ecks, Doublex, and Triplex to sanction widespread homicide after receiving their "food, and jewels, and gold"? As effective and chilling as this Gothic tale is, the classy "The Mail Pilot" has echoed more insistently down through the years, featuring as it does (1) the debut of Mickey's aerial ally Captain Doberman, (2) the birth of the surefire theme of Mickey getting into a great adventure while trying to master a risky trade, and (3) the first use of the "sky pirate" theme in a Disney context (cf. Tale Spin and Treasure Planet). I'd put this tale up against any of the stories in the "daring aviator" strips of the time insofar as quality and excitement are concerned. "Mickey's Horse Tanglefoot" and "The Crazy Crime Wave," the last two stories in this volume, are similarly polished and professional, with the latter introducing Dippy Dawg (Goofy) as the "Perfect Fool Foil" who will tag-team with Mickey throughout most of the rest of The Mouse's comics career. To be sure, Dippy isn't as endearing in "Crime Wave" as he would become -- an indignant Mickey literally boots him out of doors at one point -- but the classic cast is now rounding nicely into shape. Even the mini-continuity "Pluto and the Dogcatcher," which bridges the gap between "Blaggard Castle" and "The Mail Pilot," contains more than its share of interesting features: to wit, a Pluto who "thinks out loud" (was Gottfredson the first creator to show a dog doing this?) and a dogcatcher who resembles a lower-class version of Pete (as if such a thing were possible).
Tom Andrae's opening essay emphasizes, with good reason, how Gottfredson "spun off" many of his early narratives from the plots of animated cartoons. IMHO, however, the MICKEY strip truly became "great" once Gottfredson gained the confidence to craft his own plots. In that respect, "The Crazy Crime Wave" may be the single most important story in this volume. Unlike some of the earlier, choppier "original" stories, "Crime Wave" doggedly follows a single throughline to an amusingly clever payoff, and the gags sprinkled throughout are character-based (Mickey vs. the arrogant big-city detectives Barke and Howell; Mickey in "wars of wits" with his unarmed ally Dippy), as opposed to being inspired by animated slapstick. Having established to his own satisfaction that he had found a winning formula that would work on the printed page just as well as Mickey's rowdy early cartoons worked on the screen, Gottfredson leaves "Crime Wave" well positioned to move confidently into his -- and the strip's -- golden years.
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