BASIL REYNOLDS' 'DANNY THE LAMB' (1949)

Basil Reynolds (1916-2001) was one of the young artists who had joined the team of Britain's Mickey Mouse Weekly during its inception in 1936, creating the excellent (non-Disneyic) 'Skit, Skat & the Captain' humourous comics for this magazine, as well as contributing illustrations for the 'Shuffled Symphonies' text story series, not to mention making Elmer and Tillie gag comics. His work would disappear in MMW during the 2nd World War (perhaps he was drafted?), with 'Skit, Skat & the Captain' being taken over by an inferior artist before being discontinued altogether, but he would return to the same magazine, then retitled as Mickey Mouse, sometime after the war. In a comment appended to one of the below posts (March 26) in this blog, John Wigmans had identifed the artist for some of the British-made Bucky Bug material in Mickey Mouse in 1947-48 as Reynolds. The 'Danny the Lamb' series, which had started in no. 499 (dated Sept. 3rd 1949; see above scan), is also by Reynolds. The below scans are from no. 500 and no. 505:Reynolds' 'Danny the Lamb' was first heralded in the editorial page of no. 488 of MM, announcing the new comics to be featured in the coming issue when the magazine would be re-enlarged back to 12 pages (it had been reduced to 8 pages in 1940 during the tail end of its first weekly era):
'Danny the Lamb' would be short-lived and soon replaced by 'Big Top', a non-Disneyic strip by Reynolds.
Danny had first appeared in the non-animation Disney movie So Dear To My Heart (1949). Immediately prior to the debut of Reynold's gag comics series, Danny was featured in an illustrated text story in the US Walt Disney's Comics ad Stories no. 107, dated Aug. 1949. He would appear in four more such stories in the same magazine between 1950-62, but the British series would remain his only proper comics.