I would imagine all writers have moments like this...
In the midst of your everyday activities, you run across something you wrote and, for any number of reasons, was never used. What follows is such a specimen of unseen text that was intended for Fantagraphics Hardcover Library of "Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson - March of the Zombies" (2015).
Due to a variety of factors that I suspect were too unimportant for anyone to clearly recall at this date, I found that I had prepared an introductory text for “Mickey Mouse on a Secret Mission”, a story that had already been assigned to Thad Komorowski - who, as you would expect, did an awesome job with it!
As lesser-luck would have it, I learned (or realized) this rather important fact after I had completed my own text intro. And so it lie dormant on some old "memory stick" while I hurried a text intro for a different story into production...
...Until I rediscovered it today, and decided that it would make for good "Blog-fodder"! (No gangster jokes, please!)
So, from out of a past that, for whatever reason (choose your own), seems much more distant than it really is, we present...
“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and
Something ‘Blew’ by at Incredible Speed” … or, “It All Comes Out in the
Walsh”!
If the now-popular phrase “game changer” existed in late 1942, there’s no doubt it would apply
to the coming of Bill Walsh as writer of Floyd Gottfredson’s
Mickey Mouse newspaper strip continuities.
Defying the apparent contradiction in terms, Walsh
simultaneously takes us to “familiar places” and to those completely new. “New places” applied particularly to subject
matter, with many notions that were inconceivable just a few years
earlier.
His first tale, later given the “spoiler title” of “The Nazi
Submarine”, is essentially a short, gag-oriented story of Mickey going
undercover to bust a black market gasoline ring. Where it leads, however, is a place where “no
Mouse has gone before”, a confrontation with Nazis!
Consider that our hero has vanquished villains of every
stripe, from ordinary “egg-robbers”, to western bandits, mad scientists, and
even crooked lawyers. But, this was a
new and universally feared type of evil now infiltrating the shores of
Mouseton. We’re hardly allowed recovery
from the shock, before Bill Walsh ups the ante, in his epic second effort, by
sending Mickey on an unprecedented “Secret Mission”.
As our essay title suggests, “Mickey Mouse on a Secret
Mission” is a nicely executed balancing act of “Something Old” and “Something New”,
beginning with Mickey’s kidnapping. The
perpetrators of the abduction are eventually revealed as government agents who recruit
the Mouse for a patriotic mission, mirroring 1936’s “Mickey Mouse Joins the
Foreign Legion”.
Other familiar beats include: Mickey’s unsuccessfully donning a disguise to
gather intel, as seen in “Mickey Mouse Outwits The Phantom Blot" (1939), and
Mickey’s spirited midair melee with Peg Leg Pete from “Island in the Sky" (1936).
However, it is Walsh’s nice satirical twist on this “skirmish
in the sky” that also places our story firmly into the “New” column, as
Mickey’s modern combat techniques fall far short of his good old fashioned
brawling, when it comes to giving Pete a pummeling.
The “New” side of the ledger is also livened by Walsh’s use of sub-conscious or out-of-body selves for both Mickey and Pete, a heretofore never attempted “sideways vertical” panel in the strip of October 5 (which Western Publishing reformatted into an ACTUAL vertical panel for the reprint in WALT DISNEY’S COMICS AND STORIES # 48, 1944), and the story’s main focus: the super-plane known as “The Bat” – let alone Pete’s startling conversion from “garden variety thug” to Nazi spy.
Since “something borrowed” (from prior Gottfredson continuities) is also “something old”, let’s advance to that “something that blew by”.
Walsh and Mickey use the super-speed and sheer power of The
Bat to wreak havoc on the Nazi war machine with deftness of action usually
reserved for animation. As great a
practitioner of the classic Disney style, within the “still” medium of the
comic strip, as Floyd Gottfredson was, the non-stop comedic destruction brought
on by The Bat seems to have “upped his game” all the more to keep pace with
Walsh’s mile-a-minute mauling of our enemy’s vaunted might.
If there is a minor criticism of “Mickey Mouse on a Secret
Mission” to be made, it is in Walsh’s overall pacing. The training and initial flight sequences, as
humorous and entertaining as they were, played out over 23 strips, from July 29
thru August 24. In stark contrast,
Pete’s capture was accomplished in only ONE strip – and, in actuality, one
PANEL. Perhaps the front-loading of gags
led to a forced and abrupt ending to Pete’s spy stint that moved even faster
than did “The Bat”!
Not to worry, however, because Bill Walsh would “work it
out”, and his seemingly-limitless imagination would introduce us to such
memorable characters and concepts as Eega Beeva, The Rhyming Man, “The Lectro
Box”, and “The World of Tomorrow”! …I
can’t wait to see it all unfold again!
[END of Unused Text]
...And "unfold" it most certainly did - making us all the merrier for it!
For anyone who has the book pictured above (...And WHY WOULDN'T YOU? It's great!), check out the text I *did* submit!
If there's anything I learned from watching the great Irwin Allen's 1960s sci-fi TV shows, it's that "you never throw something away, if you can use it again"! So, have a gander (not Gladstone) at the amount of material from this unused text that I repurposed for the published text on page 134.
6 comments:
I really like this article. I am pleased that you were able to re-purpose so much of it for the introduction that made it into print. The context is different, and yet the overall context remains the same, which is to provide a commentary on the Mickey Mouse comic strip. In a sense, all of the introductions serve the same basic purpose--to expand upon and add insights into the various adventures that newspaper readers got to experience over the years. So the "newer" introduction works very well--although I really like the original. It's fascinating to observe the creative process at work, and as a writer I never get tired of studying creative and editorial decisions that writers make. Good material deserves to be preserved and presented, in whatever form it eventually reaches print.
I notice that in the section of the book that you introduced, there is a clear dividing line between the two stories, which seems to occur more frequently once Walsh took over the writing. One aspect of Gottfredson's plotting that I greatly admire and appreciate is his ability to transition gradually from one adventure to another. This is probably most in evidence--or at any rate it's the greatest example I can think of--at the end of "Monarch of Medioka," when for several days Mickey and Minnie traveled across Europe and later across the ocean before finally arriving back in their home town. So much nicer and more effective than simply terminating the story in Medioka and showing them back at home the very next day. There are many more such examples during the Gottfredson era, and while Walsh occasionally followed suit with this approach--for the most part, once one story was over, he moved on, often abruptly. The ending of "The House of Mystery" is an example of the latter. This is a point where some debriefing and decompressing would have helped greatly, as the tale ends in tragedy. I can see why, from an editorial standpoint, showing Mickey and Minnie processing through grief would not be encouraged to be shown, but from a reader's point of view, some form of transition at that juncture would have provided greater closure.
I also notice that in the rewrite you made reference to Yogi Bear. Of course, I could not be other than pleased that you managed to work that in. Alluding to Hanna-Barbera while discussing Disney is always a welcome juxtaposition in my book!
This is an interesting article. Thank you for sharing it. As much as I like the mid-30s Gottfredson continuities, there is a liveliness to Walsh’s scripts and Gottfredson’s art in the 1940s that makes them stand out. By the late 40s-early 50s, Mickey’s adventurers become almost as absurd as a Rocky and Bullwinkle story, yet Walsh (mostly) knows when to take something seriously and when to play a scene for laughs (but not always).
Scarecrow:
Like you, I am fascinated by “The Process”, when it comes to writing!
What can I learn from the experiences of others? How did things develop in the way they did? Why were certain things abandoned, or changes made?, etc.
And, I’d like to think I’ve given the folks who still faithfully visit this humble Blog a taste of that – not to mention trotting out something that, for a variety of reasons, was heretofore unseen. That’s what fascinates me most… “The Unseen”!
This was an unusual, and one-of-a-kind, experience due to the circumstances. But, these minor and seemingly-easy-to-write text pieces are actually among the most difficult things that I do for comics!
Why? Because, in the absence of a suggested direction or slant from the editor, I simply read, or re-read with a more analytical eye, the story or stories I’m asked to write about… and pretty much decide my own way to go! These are not reviewed until I submit them as a “finished product”.
Now, don’t think I don’t appreciate the FAITH that is put in me to turn-in an informative and enjoyable deliverable – because it is greatly appreciated! And I do my absolute best to maintain that faith.
But, occasionally, that means that what I submit is completely at odds with editorial expectations… and I have to start over again from scratch. Sometimes without even “scratch” to use as a base! Such an occasion was my text intro on “The Gleam”! Whatever I originally wrote for that, was completely unlike what was published! Not that it was “bad” (I’d stay up for a WEEK, before I summitted something below my personally high standards!), but because it wasn’t what was “expected”.
In this case, however, I submitted a completely finished, ready-for-print product that would have met with “expectation” (you all can decide if it met with “your expectations”), but for the mix-up in assignments. Scrambling for a new deliverable meant the analytical reading of two-more stories, and deciding on another direction to take!
But, it was a challenge I welcomed… particularly because I wasn’t just writing about “one story”, but of a transitional shift in the content and direction of the strip. So, I had to “think bigger”, and still made an effort to preserve some of which I’d previously written.
Oh, and the parallels to “future-favorite” properties Yogi Bear and F-Troop were just to great to ignore, at least to my “everything-comes-from-somewhere” way of thinking!
One final thing related to “The Process”: There was probably no better training ground for writing this sort of introductory text piece than all the Letters-Of-Comment I wrote for the comic books themselves – because, there too, you have to read the story in a more analytical way and decide on the direction your comments will take. With over 300 published letters from 1983 thru the early 2000’s (once letter columns vanished for good), I’d already had the form nicely locked-down.
Deb:
Once I’d seen enough of the overall trajectory of the strip over the entirety its “continuity years” to make any sort of judgment, I regarded “Pre-Walsh Gottfredson” (classic-era Mickey) as a completely different animal than that of the more modernistic Walsh-era.
Walsh’s often amazing flights-of-fancy were the same sort of thing I love so much about 1960s sci-fi and adventure TV! I’ve said that “Bill Walsh was ‘60s BEFORE the ‘60s!”
Oddly, the Carl Fallberg / Paul Murry comic book Mickey falls in between the two, with it leaning more toward the classic side – and the later Cecil Beard / Paul Murry (or Jack Manning) comic book Mickey also falls in between the two, but leans more toward Walsh!
So, you could say that the Mickey comics from Dell and Gold Key were (fittingly) sort of parallels to the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, but with both poles demonstrated to a smaller extreme. And each one of these noticeable shifts were born of a change in the writer! …Yay, writers!
It occurs to me that, if you read Thad Komorowski’s excellent text intro to “Mickey Mouse on a Secret Mission”, as published in the book, you’ll also get a (to me, anyway) fascinating look at how two different writers would handle the same assignment!
If that’s not great “Process Stuff”, I don’t know what is!
Tutto Gottfredson!
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