BRITISH FOLLOW-UP TO DONALD'S PSEUDO-DEBUT

In an earlier post at this blog on Dec. 2d, 2008, I had extensively covered what I call as Donald Duck's "pseudo-debut" in the illustrated story book The Adventures of Mickey Mouse (1931) where he was named as one of Mickey's barnyard friends. Next year, Donald Duck would also get a mention in a British publication. An 8-pages illustrated text piece titled 'Mickey's 'Hoozoo'' in the third Mickey Mouse Annual (1932) introduces several of "Mickey's friends and foes" and Donald Duck gets a one-time mention in the third page (scan above).
'Mickey's 'Hoozoo'' is partially partially derivative of The Adventures of Mickey Mouse which had a British edition as well. The Adventures of Mickey Mouse has a plot while 'Mickey's 'Hoozoo'' is just a collection of sketches and the latter includes several characters not mentioned in the former, but there are several obvious connections, beginning with the fact some of the illustrations in the British annual are clearly copied/redrawn from the US book, such as the cat figure in the first page..

.. and the pig figure in the second page:

Equally significant is the fact that the character known today as Horace Horsecollar is named as Henry Horse and Clarabella Cow as Carolyne Cow in both publications. Hence, the inclusion of Donald Duck in the third Mickey Mouse Annual can be explained by its derivative relation to The Adventures of Mickey Mouse.

PRE-WAR BRITISH DISNEY PUBLICATIONS - PART 2: COLLINS CLEAR-TYPE PRESS

In a post last month in this blog, I had provided a general overview of pre-war Disney books in Britain, concentrating on books by Dean, the pioneer of Disney publications in the UK. In that post, it was noted that the London & Glasgow-based Collins Clear-Type Press was the most prolific publisher of Disney books in Britain in the pre-war era and their books needed to be covered in a separate post. Collins' pre-war publications include a long series of illustrated story adaptation books of Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons, books for school beginner kids, annuals and Snow White books.' Their first Disney publication was Mickey Mouse in Giant Land (1934), featuring an illustrated story adaptation of the cartoon Giantland (1933). Below are scans of its color plate and two of its 44 full page b&w illustrations:

The same adaptation was published in the same year in US by David McKay Co., with a similar but non-identical cover art:

In 1935, Collins put out two more books in the same vein: Mickey Mouse in Pigmy Land and Mickey Mouse Crusoe:

They are illustrated story adaptations of Gulliver Mickey (1934) and Mickey's Man Friday. These two books were published, with identical covers, in the US by Whitman in 1936, that is one year after Collins' books came out, which indicates that Collins' early Mickey Mouse books were originally British-made and not British editions of US publications. Collins' last illustrated books derived from Mickey Mouse cartoons were Mickey Mouse Fire Brigade (1936) and Mickey Mouse and Pluto the Pup (1936), adaptations of Mickey's Fire Brigade (1935) and Pluto's Judgement Day (1935) respectively.

In addition to story books derived from cartoons, Collins also published several books aimed at first-grade school children, such as A Mickey Mouse Story from A to Z:

There is a 1936 Whitman book titled A Mickey Mouse Alphabet Book with an identical cover art, but since Collins' book is undated, it is hard to know which one came out first.
In 1937, Collins published Don Mickey, in a similar format to the cartoon-derived books but with a original story; this book will later be covered in a separate post in this blog.

Around 1934-36, Collins also published illustrated story adaptations several Silly Symphony cartoons, including Santa's Workshop, Nursery Stories, Water Babies, The Golden Touch, The Night Before Christmas:

For the year 1937, Collins put out a Silly Symphoy Annual:

This would remain a one-shot annual, as Collins would begin issuing Donald Duck annuals from 1938 onwards. Following the release of Disney's first feature-length animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Collins published several publications derived from this movie, including coloring books.
One of the most prized Collins publications is the flip-book Donald & Pluto (1939):

Probably the last of Collins' pre-war Disney books (or perhaps the first of their war-time Disney publications, as it is undated) is an adaptation of late Silly Symphony cartoon Ugly Duckling (1939):

FIRST MICKEY MOUSE ANNUAL (1930)

The first Mickey Mouse Annual, published by London's Dean & Son Ltd, is of great significance in the history of Disney publications. Published possibly around Christmas of 1930, it is the first-ever Disney book published for retail, a Mickey Mouse Book which had come earlier in the same year in the US having been printed as a give-away for promotion purposes. Furthermore, this MMA marks the first-ever appearance of Disney comics produced for publication other than newspaper syndication.

The annual opens with the below color plate...

...opposite this title page:

Oddly, there is no reference whatsoever to any affliation to the Disney company in either this title page or anywhere else in the annual that I could spot (most subsequent British Disney publications would include a tagline about "permission from the Walt Disney Mickey Mouse Ltd.").
While the larger figure of Mickey is copied from a US cartoon poster, the small Minnie figures at the bottom of the title page are taken from a model sheet produced by Disney to be utilized in creation of graphics on misc. items. See post dated March 30, 2009 from http://vintagedisneymemorabilia.blogspot.com/ for some info on this sheet as well as further examples of its utilization in MMA, including the figures in the below introduction page:

Below is the scan of the first gag page (acc. to David Gerstein's index at inducks, it is "partly made up of US clip art").

This is in a format close the comics format in the sense it includes more than one 'panel', but, in my opinion, would qualify only as a 'pseudo-comics' because while the the panels are sequential in a sense, they are not in the same diegesis (ie. the event depicted in the second panel is not of the same plane of reality as of the first panel).
The subsequent page on the other had features the first gag in the 'proper' comics format:

The artist on this, and most of the other comics pages in MMA, is Wilfred Haughton, best known as the artist of the highly acclaimed cover illustrations of Britain's Mickey Mouse Weekly onwards from its inception in 1936 till circa 1940. Haughton had been working on Dean's MM Annuals prior to his assignment to the MMW project. The bulk of the first MMA consists of such gag-a-page comics. Below follows a sampling of my favorite ones or those which I find interesting for various reasons:

I find the above gag noteworthy for two reasons. First, the side-line inclusion of a secondary humour element in the monkey silently stealing Mickey's food in the second panel is remarkable. Furthermore, producing a gag about women's fear of mice personified in Minnie's such fear is, on one had, ironic since she is, after all, an andromorphized mouse, and, on the other had, significant in showing the degree of internalizing the andromorph nature of Minnie (and Mickey).

The below gag is interesting in its inclusion of proper human beings into Mickey's world, which is out of line with Disney comics in general:

For my taste, I personally find the two below gags some of the funniest in this annual:

Unfortunately, MMA also includes some rather distasteful gags as well:

Even if the majority of the gag-comics in the first MMA can be assumed to be the work of Haughton, there were clearly more than one artist working on the comics in this publication. Below is a sample with markedly different and far more cruder graphic style:

In addition to gag-a-page comics, the first MMA also includes several gags in the format of non-panelized illustrations accompanied with text. The below one is interesting because it features Minnie's "papa", which we never see or even hear about in US comics:

Several of these non-comics gag pages incorporate illustrations from the US Mickey Mouse Book, such as the below one (see the post on MMB from Nov. 22, 2008 on this blog for a comparison with its original US edition):

The first MMA ends with this advertisement:

However, in addition to the first one at the very beginning, there are three more color plates throughout the annual:

DAISY'S FIRST INCARNATION AS DONNA IN MICKEY MOUSE WEEKLY

Donald's longtime girlfriend had actually debutted as a Mexican lady named Donna in the cartoon Don Donald (1937). It appears that she might have been initially intended as a one-time character as she was not seen in any further cartoons for more than three years until she appeared in Mr Duck Steps Out (1940) as the Daisy we all know. Following the release of that cartoon, Daisy would accompay Donald in US newspaper comics strips even though Donna had not made it into comics in the US. However, Donna had frequently appeared in Britain's Mickey Mouse Weekly. Her first print appearance in MMW -the scan above- was in the editorial page of no. 47, dated Dec. 26th, 1936, promoting the upcoming Don Donald cartoon. Scan of the corresponding text is below:


In the next issue, Donna's portrait was seen on the wall of Donald's home in a gag-strip, titled 'A "Good" Start For The New Year!' and by an unknown British artist, in the color central pages, marking her debut in the comics format:

In the following weeks, she also appeared in the covers of no. 49, 52 and 54:

In no. 58, she was the subject of this depiction of a song:

The answer would be revealed in the next issue as 'Why did I kiss that girl?', apparently a popular song dating from 1920s. That issue included the below puzzle featuring Donald and Donna:

No. 66 of MMW announced an upcoming new comics serial headlining Donald and Donna, which would be the first-ever adventure comics of Donald:

EARLIEST BRITISH DISNEY BOOKS

The London-based Dean & Son Ltd was the pioneer of Disney publications in the UK, beginning with the first Mickey Mouse Annual in 1930. Next year, they published a British edition of Mickey Mouse Illustrated Movie Stories, published in the US in the same year by David McKay, with identical cover art as the US edition. 1931 also saw the British editon of McKay's The Adventures of Mickey Mouse by George Harrap & Co. Next year, Dean published a book titled as More Adventures of Mickey Mouse:

This book appears to be a retitled British edition of McKay's The Adventures of Mickey Mouse - Book 2, with new cover art. Actually, the cover of Dean's edition is a reworking of the back cover of McKay's edition, with Minnie redrawn as Mickey!

In 1933, Dean published Mickey Mouse - The Great Big Midget Book:

I am not sure if the content of this book is from one of the American 'Big Little Books'. Next year, Dean would publish the British edition of the pop-up book Mickey Mouse in King Arthur's Court, with identical cover art as its American edition by Blue Ribbon from a year ago. In 1934, the London & Glasgow-based Collins Clear Type Press would also begin publishing Mickey Mouse books and would really begin to dominate the British market of Disney publications throughout the rest of the decade, but Dean would also continue to publish Disney books. In 1935, they published British editions of McKay's Mickey Mouse Movie Stories Book 2 from the previous year, as well as Three Orphan Kittens, Tortoise and the Hare and Robber Kitten, illustrated story adaptations of Disney's 'Silly Symphony' cartoons published in the same year in the US by Whitman. These large and oblong-formatted books are among the best-looking pre-war Disney books with numerous beautiful full-page color illustrations. Apart from the Mickey Mouse Annuals which continued to be published well into the next decades, the last Disney books by Dean in the pre-war era appear to be a Snow White Annual from 1938 and Snow White and Magic Mirror from 1939, the latter with 3-D plates to be viewed with special spectacles.

Collins' Disney books are too many to list here and would better be dealt in a separate blog, but three other British publishers needs to be mentioned in covering the pre-war era, John Lane the Botley Head, the Birn Brothers Ltd and the Juvenile Productions, all of which will also be covered in future blogs.

MICKEY MOUSE COLORING BOOK (1931)

In addition to illustrated story books, comics albums and 'movie story books' by David McKay Co., the earliest Mickey Mouse publications also include two coloring books by Saalfield Co.: Mickey Mouse Coloring Book and Mickey Mouse Pictures to Paint, both of which came out in the summer of 1931. I have never seen the latter anywhere, but the former is available at ebay.
Available scans indicate that some of the illustrations in Mickey Mouse Coloring Book come from Mickey Mouse Book published by Bibo & Lang the year before (see the Nov.22 post in this blog), such as the middle illustration in the first scan below and the bottom illustration in the second scan below:


Below are some other nice scans from Mickey Mouse Coloring Book

With this post, I round up the coverage of earliest American Mickey Mouse publications from 1930-31. Coming posts in this blog will deal with other Mickey Mouse publications from 1930s, so stay tuned on..

VINTAGE COMICS BLOG RE-ACTIVATED

Anyone interested in vintage comics in general are invited to take a look at my other blog on pre-war and wartime comics, which I have recently re-activated after several months of inactivity there: http://kayaozkaracalar.blogspot.com/

MICKEY MOUSE MOVIE STORY BOOKS

Besides illustrated story books with original material and reprints of Mickey Mouse newspaper comics in album format, David McKay Co. also published a series of books featuring story adaptations of Mickey cartoon shorts, with stills fom the cartoons themselves used as illustrations.
The first of this kind was the hardcover Mickey Mouse Illustrated Movie Stories which came out at the tail end of 1931. This 200+ pages book featured stories and stills of 11 cartoon shorts from 1930-31.

A budget-priced abridged version featuring only four cartoons (all also featured in the other book) was also published the same year, titled simply as Mickey Mouse Story Book, featuring a different, and more alluring, cover illustration, which saw probably the first-ever appearence of Pluto on a book cover. A Turkish edition of this book would be published in 1944:


David McKay's next pair of 'movie story books' would come in 1934.
The oblong-format Mickey Mouse Movie Stories - Book 2 contains stories of 12 cartoons from the years 1932-34.

Mickey Mouse Stories from the same year contains stories of only four cartoons, all which had earlier been published in 1931's Mickey Mouse Illustrated Movie Stories.

THE FIRST AMERICAN DISNEY COMICS BOOK

The first-ever Disney comics book published in the US is titled as Mickey Mouse Series No. 1. It was published by David McKay Co. in 1931 as the first installement of a series of annual comics albums reprinting select Mickey Mouse newspaper comics. It is in the format of other comics albums published in the 1930s by McKay reprinting other popular newspaper comics such as Popeye, that is roughly in square shape with cardboard cover (the book is slightly larger size than my scanner's area, so the above and below scans trim approximately 1 cm length from both the top and the bottom).
The reverse of the front cover carries an ad for the first printing of the illustrated story book The Adventures of Mickey Mouse and below is the scan of the title page:

Reverse of the title page features a "foreword" by Walt Disney where he dedicates this volume both to the fans of Mickey Mouse and to "those masters of merriment, my ever loyal associates, whose brains and brushes, pens and pencils, have been of untold aid". The rest of the book is 47 pages of comics, reprinting Mickey Mouse strips, re-formatted as below in the first page:

This re-formatting, which breaks each daily strip (originally of one row) into two rows, is nevertheless quite acceptable because each page still has one daily strip, so the original intent of the original creators with regards to rihtym is faithfully reproduced.
The daily strips reprinted in this volume date from a time span of from late 1930 to early 1931. First, we have one month of strips from Sept. 23 to Oct. 24 which tell the story of Minnie being courted and apparently seduced by an irritating (for Mickey!) rat named Slicker. All this drives Mickey to several unsuccessful suicide attempts! This is a now-legendary episode in the history of Mickey Mouse comics and has never been reprinted in the US again...
In the original newspaper run of the strips, Slicker was eventually revealed to be a fortune-hunter, but the reprints in Mickey Mouse Series No. 1 jump from Mickey qiving up his futile suicide attempts to a series of loosely-related gag strips where he and Minnie have united. These are originally dated from Dec. 27th to Jan. 14th; the volume ends with one more reprint of a gag strip, dated Jan. 17th.
The reverse of the back cover is blank and the back cover itself carries the same illustration as on the front cover.

We do not know precisely in which month Mickey Mouse Series No. 1 was printed, but since it carries an ad for the first printing of the illustrated story book The Adventures of Mickey Mouse, which had come out around May, it must have come out around either mid-1931 or in the 2nd half of the year. This estimate disqualifies it from being the first-ever Disney comics book published in the world because a French album, titled Les aventures de Mickey, reprinting Mickey Mouse strips had already been published in France by Hachette around March that year. And even before that, a Mickey Mouse Annual, featuring short gag comics beside non-comics material, had been published in UK around the Christmas season of 1930.

The second through to the the fourth volumes carry the title Book No. 2, Book Bo.3 and Book No. 4, rather than the word "series" as in the first volume. Book No. 3 reprints Mickey Mouse Sunday half-page comics and is in full color:


The last of the series, Book No. 4, came out in 1934:
This book once again reprints daily strips in black&white. The strips reprinted in this volume are all from 1931. First, there is a continuity from early 1931 in which Mickey engages in a series of fights with a new cat in the neighborhood. This continuity has never been reprinted in the US again, perhaps because of its violent contents. Then, there is another continuity from late 1931 in which Mickey decides to play the cupid. Only parts of this continuity entailing a subplot where Mickey works as a fireman has seen further reprints.

THE ADVENTURES OF MICKEY MOUSE (1931)

While the significance of The Adventures of Mickey Mouse (1931) stems from the facts that it is the first Disney book published for retail and that it features the pseudo-debut of Donald Duck (see below post), it is also interesting for some other aspects and is overall a very nice book on its own merits.

First of all, The Adventures of Mickey Mouse is ideal stuff for those (like me) who have a soft spot for stories where Mickey is accompanied by a bunch of other vintage characters, as seen in this spread illustration on the reverse of its front cover:

This spread illustration also signals that the book will reflect the tone of the Mickey Mouse cartoons of the era. The setting clearly belongs to a farm building, in line with the 'barnyard' origin of Mickey Mouse. The depicted event is a musical gathering, which was the central theme of a large part of the earliest cartoons.

Below scans are those of the credits page (the image therein will be used in later Mickey Mouse books as well), copyright page and the dedication page:

The image on the dedication page (above right) actually contradicts the content of the story featured in the book. In that image, Minnie is seen standing by a house proper to her size; however, in the story, both Mickey and Minnie are portrayed as real-life mice-sized creatures living in "nests": Minnie's "home nest" is said to be "hidden, soft and warm, somewhere in the chicken house" while Mickey "lives in cozy nest under the floor of the old barn". Below image is a scan of the full-page illustration prior to the first text page, showing the interiors of Mickey's nest, perfectly capturing the "cozy" nature expressed in the text:

And below image is a scan of an illustration depicting the exteriors of the same nest, similarly made beautiful by the subtle use of soft-tone coloring, as well as by the simple but very charming props:

And below are scans of two pages further in the story, where Minnie's nest is depicted (not to mention her patched panty in full view!):

The plot of the story is very simple: Mickey tricks the ever-menacing Claws the Cat into getting caught in a trap he'd set up for Mickey and safely holds a party for his farm friends. These friends include many characters familiar from Mickey cartoons of the era, some of which turned out to be long-lasting and some of which largely faded into oblivion over the years. These are, first and foremost, Horace Horsecollar and Clarabella Cow, who are named here as "Henry Horse" and "Carloyn Cow". It would be interesting track down when these two of Mickey's oldest friends were first named under the names we know them today. Other mentioned characters are Patricia Pig, Donald Duck (see below post), Clara Cluck the Hen, Robert Rooster, Long Dog the Dachshund, George and Gertie Goat.

Patricia Pig is portrayed in several of the illustrations, including the below:

In addition to the early Mickey Mouse cartoons since 1929, Patricia Pig was also featured in Mickey Mouse daily strip and Sunday page comics in the early 1930s. Her comics appearances would become less sparodic in the 1940s and she would disappear from newspaper comics from early 1950s onwards ('though she would be revived in the 1980s).

On the other hand, I can not spot Clara Cluck, or any hen for that matter, in any of the illustrations in The Adventures of Mickey Mouse even though she is mentioned twice in the text. More curiosly, -not counting an unmaned hen in Mickey's Follies (1929)- the hen known as Clara Cluck does not seem to have appeared in Mickey cartoons by then either! So, Donald Duck is not alone in getting a reference in this book prior to a cartoon appearance... Clara Cluck wouldn't appear in newspaper comics in the 1930s despite her highlight performance in the popular cartoon Orphan's Benefit (1934), but she would have her own comics stories in comics magazines after Orphan's Benefit's color remake in 1943.

As for "Robert Rooster", I cannot spot any rooster in any of the illustrations, either. Actually, I am not aware of any Disney character explicitly named as such in any other media, but there was a rooster in at least two Mickey Mouse cartoons from 1929: The Plowboy and Mickey's Follies.

On the other hand, "George and Gertie Goat" does appear in several of the illustrations. Goat characters had also appeared in early Mickey Mouse cartoons, but I am not aware if they were ever named in that media. A similar goat character named Gideon Goat would appear in Mickey Mouse newspaper comics in the first half of the 1930s before disappearing into complete oblivion.

"Long Dog the Dachshund" also does appear in one illustration, the beautiful one scanned below. He had debutted in the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy (1928) and appeared in the earliest Mickey Mouse daily strips, but could not become a long-lasting character.

I will post about other Mickey Mouse books from 1931 in this blog as well, so stay tune on..

PSEUDO-DEBUT OF DONALD DUCK IN 1931'S THE ADVENTURES OF MICKEY MOUSE

The first Disney publication of 1931 was The Adventures of Mickey Mouse, which appears to have come out around May (it was copyrighted on May 19). Besides being the first-ever Disney book produced for retail (1930's Mickey Mouse Book was largely, if not exclusively, utilized as a promotional give-away), this book also has a great curiosity value in that if features the pseudo-debut of the most popular Disney character, Donald Duck, long before his appearance in the cartoon short Wise Little Hen (1933).
The Donald Duck of The Adventures of Mickey Mouse actually has got what can be called a 'bit part' in this illustrated story book. In the first page of the story, Mickey's "many friends in the old barn" are listed by their names and one of the six names (besides Minnie) listed is "Donald Duck". No duck picture accompanies this page.

Interestingly, all the other characters named together with Donald Duck as Mickey's friends were at the time already frequently appearing as side characters in Mickey Mouse cartoons of the era, but it was only Donald Duck which had not yet appeared in a cartoon prior to the publication of this book. Perhaps some sense can be made out of this seeming anomaly by hypothesizing that there might have existed in the Disney studio what might be a list, however rudimentary, of possible side characters with tentative names to populate the Disney universe.
Or, even a wilder hyphothesis might be that perhaps this "Donald Duck" had already appeared in Mickey cartoons by then?! Look at the Mickey Mouse cartoon The Birthday Party, released in January 1931, that is a only few months before the publication of The Adventures of Mickey Mouse, and you'll see ducks there among the crowd throwing a party at Mickey, alongside the other familiar (and some unfamiliar) side characters...

It would not be too farfetched to think that one of the unnamed ducks of the cartoon might be the duck named as Donald in the book. At least this much can be assumed with reasonable safety: the creators of the book almost certainly must have looked at the most recent cartoons to draw upon the supporting cast of their story, and when they did, they saw ducks as well as horses, cows, pigs, et al. Of course, where did the name Donald came from and who named that name might never be known.

Besides the introduction at the first page, Donald Duck is mentioned for the second and last time in the text halfway through story as one of the farm characters who accept Mickey's invitation for a party:

In the illustration, we see two ducks coming out of the pond to meet Mickey and Minnie. However, unlike all the other farm folk, these ducks do not appear to be clothed. Even Horace (by the way, he is named as Henry in this story) who is on his fours is wearing a hat and is hence semi-humanized, but these ducks are not.

A pair of fully clothed ducks do appear on the spread illustration on the reverse of the back cover 'though:

The text reference to farm folk accepting Mickey's invitation had mentioned "their families" as well and hence we have a male and a female duck in this illustration. (Is the female duck a pseudo-debut of Daisy? Well, I will not go into that... ). The back cover features the male duck - obviously Donald Duck of the text- solo:

The next mention of Donald Duck as one of Mickey's friends would come one and a half years later in the British Mickey Mouse Annual and the inspiration for that text reference almost certainly have come from The Adventures of Mickey Mouse.

In the next post in this blog, I will cover The Adventures of Mickey Mouse extensively on its own merits, so stay tuned on...

PROLIFERATION OF MICKEY MOUSE BOOKS IN 1931

As noted in the below post from last week, the first Mickey Mouse publication, Bibo & Lang's slim Mickey Mouse Book (1930), was largely (perhaps exclusively) utilized as a promotion give-away. However, Mickey Mouse publications properly for retail would proliferate in 1931 with David McKay Co. getting a license to publish Disney books.

McKay's Mickey Mouse books can be grouped broadly in three categories. On one hand, they published story books with original illustrations, starting with The Adventures of Mickey Mouse. On the other hand, they put out a series of annual comics publications exclusively reprinting samples of daily Mickey Mouse strips. Furthermore, they also published 'movie story books', with story adaptations of Mickey cartoon shorts, with stills fom the cartoons themselves used as illustrations. The first of this kind was the hardcover Mickey Mouse Illustrated Movie Stories which came out at the tail end of 1931. A budget-priced abridged version was also published the same year, titled simply as Mickey Mouse Story Book. In addition to McKay's books, Saalfield Co. published Mickey Mouse Coloring Book and Mickey Mouse Pictures to Paint, both of which came out in the summer of 1931.

This post was intended merely as an introduction, and several of these books will be covered individually in coming posts in this blog, with extensive scans, so stay tuned on...

THE FIRST MICKEY MOUSE PUBLICATION

The first print appearance of Mickey Mouse (naturally besides posters and other publicity material of cartoons themselves) was with the daily newspaper strips which began in early 193o (An excellent web site covering to the earliest Mickey strips is at http://bobcat74.free.fr/mmds/plane/pln001.htm). The first publication exclusively devoted to Mickey on the other hand was the Mickey Mouse Book published later the same year. Vintage Disneyana collectibles expert David Lesjak's highly recommended blog had already covered this book in a post last year (http://vintagedisneymemorabilia.blogspot.com/2007/12/mickey-mouse-book.html), but I want to go over it again with a bit of additional detail and this time provide a complete run of scans. According to the collectors' guide Disneyana, this slim booklet was distributed to dimestores and often utilized as a give-away with toys; David says it was distributed to theaters to be used as a promotional item for the newly-founded Mickey Mouse Clubs.

The contents are a 4-page illustrated story, several games and songs, as well as a few full-page illustrations.

The main feature of the book, the four-page story, is credited to Bobette Bibo, the publisher's 11-year old child. It is a simple but very interesting story involving Mickey's debut. It starts in "mouse fairyland" where a mischief-making mouse, named simply as "mouse 13" is expelled because of his "pranks". The mouse falls through the skies and lands in a house in Hollywood. Having found and eaten some cheese, he begins to dance on his own from joy. The resident of the house happens to be Walt Disney and, having observed the little mouse dancing and doing tricks, says, "You give me an idea for a series of comedies. I have an idea that I can make you a picture star." And, as we all know, he does make good of his word. Mickey is still said to live in the same house with WD, in a hole!, even though he has a habit of sneaking into WD's bed at night and sleeping with him...

This story of Walt Disney's encounter with a little mouse in his house might have been an inspiration for Disney when he made up the highly popularized account that his inspiration for Mickey was a real mouse in his studio (see below post).

And below are the scans of the next four pages, all game-related:

Page 10 is a nice full-page illustration:

The remaining pages are devoted to a Mickey song and a Mickey march

except for the last page, which once again features a full-page illustration:

The reverse of the back cover is blank, but the back cover itself features the below illustration, which is nice in the sense it features a bunch of characters but perhaps a bit irratingly pretentious in its effort to be too much merry-looking (at least for my taste):

Disneyana guide claims the illustrations were drawn by Ub Iwerks, but the art doesn't really look like Iwerks' and David notes that artist Albert Barbella had submitted a bill to Disney Studio in September 1930 for his work on this publication. Here is an informative web page on Barbella: http://www.hulapages.com/barbelle.htm

Subsequent editions of Mickey Mouse Book entailed some revisions. While the cover of the first edition had a light green background, later editions had a darker green tone. The age of Bobetto Bibo was added to the title-credits page. Two samples from the Mickey newspaper strips were added to page 8 and to the backcover. Last but not least, the lyrics of the song were re-written to censor the lines "When little Minnie's pursued by a big bad villain - We feel so bad then we're so glad when you up and kill".

THE CREATION OF MICKEY MOUSE

The answer to the question "who created Mickey Mouse?" might not be as straightforward what the above illustration (scanned from a 1938 Turkish publication, but almost certainly of non-Turkish origin) suggests. Mickey was created as a replacement character for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Disney Studio's previous cartoon hero, after Disney was confronted by its distributor that they, and not him, had its exclusive rights. The story goes that on the train back to Hollywod after the traumatic meeting with the distributors, he came up with the idea of a mouse character (initially to be called as Mortimer, a name promptly discarded in favor of Mickey), inspired by "a little mouse which used to crawl over his drawing board while he worked in his garage studio" earlier in his career. The earliest printed version of this account that I came across (via scans of which were recently posted at http://disneybooks.blogspot.com/) was in a NYT article from 1938 (if anyone knows earlier publications, please let us know). Over the years, this story has been canonized as the account of Mickey's creation, but recent critical studies (such as M. Elliot's Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince from 1993) also point to the role of Ub Iwerks, Disney's junior partner and leading animator at the time, who is now generally accepted as the hand who must have designed and drawn the first models of Mickey Mouse. The Iwerks version claims Mickey was picked up by Walt Disney from several new cartoon hero options designed by Iwerks, and hence disputes the validity of Disney's train story version. The full truth can probably be never known for certainity and might as well lie somewhere in between the two versions.

Anyway, the real rationale of this post is bringing to light a curious (and probably spurious) variation of the Disney version and all the above was only meant as an introduction to put it in context.

The above scan is once again from a Turkish publication from 1938, no. 96 of kids magazine Yavrutürk (the other scan at the beginning of this post was from a different issue of the same magazine from the same year). It is an interesting news item about an interview the Turkish journalist Hikmet Feridun Es, on a mission from daily newspaper Akşam, reportedly held with W.Disney in his tour of the USA. The interview, as recounted in Yavrutürk, presents such an account for the origin of Mickey Mouse:

On morning, when Walt was a kidand still living with his parents, the household found a small mouse in a big and empty tin can in the kitchen. Walt pleaded with his parents to be allowed to keep the mouse alive in the bucket and was granted his request. He named the mouse Mickey and began to feed him there. Slowly, Mickey got used to Walt and he took him to his own room, giving him free reign. When visitors to their house would be amazed at the idea of keeping a mouse as pet, Walt would say that Mickey was his luck and would bring him happiness and fortune in the future. One day, the mouse was strolling among the flowers in a pot and Walt liked this miseance so much that he drew a picture of it and from then onwards took a growing interest in drawing. Eventually, Mickey would be killed by a cat.

As noted above, the canonic legend about the origin of Mickey Mouse traces his root to a mouse Walt had befriended during his Kansas animation studio era, not during his childhood. I am very eager to know if there have been any other printed accounts in line with the above account involving Walt’s childhood? Hikmet Feridun Es (1910-92) was indeed a globe-trotting Turkish journalist who published a series of articles about Hollywood. But I would not bet if he really interviewed WD in person or just somehow made this up.

MICKEY MOUSE'S 80TH "BIRTHDAY"

Today is regarded as the 80th "birthday" of Mickey Mouse, as it is the 80th anniversary of the release of cartoon short Steamboat Willie featuring Mickey (and Minnie) Mouse. Well, Steamboat Willie was not actually the first-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon in terms of production chronology: there were two others made before it, but they had been shelved after previews. In any case, for convenience sake, I also follow the custom of taking Nov.18th as Mickey's "birthday" and start this blog to commomerate it. Here you shall find nice scans and infos about vintage Disney comics and illustrated story books. Come back soon.