"To the Moon by Noon"

I thought I would write about this 'cause why not? It's an unusual team-up, and Joe Torcivia is justly proud of his work on it. Plus, it gives me a chance to talk a little bit about Paul Murry.
I'm not gonna lie to you: not a big Murry fan, here, for the usual reasons: I find his more subdued Mickey kind of flat, and much less interesting than the Gottfredson version. 'Course, the plots and writing, mostly by Carl Fallberg, don't tend to be that interesting either, which isn't really Murry's fault, but whoever is to blame--doesn't tend to do much for me. An' don't try an' tell me that Goofy takes on the energy that Mickey lost, because I think that's only true to a very limited extent--his character, too, is substantially attenuated in Murry.

I'm pretty well convinced at this point that a big part of the reason it took me as long as it did to warm to Mickey as a character is that my first exposure was to the Murry version. These days, I take a certain limited pleasure in some of his work, but generally, I think he's analogous to Tony Strobl on the duck side: a competent draughtsman responsible for some modestly entertaining stories, but rarely if ever anything really transcendent. Hey, I know he has his fans. I don't feel strongly enough about him to argue too vociferously on the subject.

I generally prefer Strobl, who was working in the general Barksian vein. Rather than following explicitly in Gottfredson's footsteps, Murry's Mickey is really his own; I suppose he deserves a certain amount of credit for originality, but the results...eh. Interesting to note, however, that, as any cursory survey will reveal, Murry has way way way more representation than does Strobl in modern (ie, Gladstone I onward) Disney comics. Not at all fair, in my opinion, but this goes back to the originality thing: pretty much everyone sees Barks as "the" duck artist, from which Strobl was just an okay knock-off; whereas, given that Gottfredson was working in strips rather than books, I think that Murry was perceived as "the" mouse artist for a lot of people [citation needed].

Anyway, what's good about this here "To the Moon by Noon" is that--in large part thanks to Joe's script, I'm thinking--the story has a lot more energy than your average Murry effort. Mickey's pretty much as he usually is in these sorts of things, but that really works in this case, as it allows him to play straight-man to Ludwig, and Ludwig's dialogue is where the story really shines.



Note the old-school title logo, which, as Joe notes, is pretty much exactly what it would've looked like had the story been published back in the day. And yeah, it would've been even cooler if that inimitable "Murry font"--you know it well if you've read any of his stuff--could have been rustled up.

Note also that some of the lines here are sort of on the fuzzy side; nothing too distracting, but I sense that finding entirely pristine artwork might have been problematic.



I don't know that I have anything super-profound to say about this story. It's not earth-shattering or anything; it's just an amusing little jaunt. I like how Ludwig confuses his scientist-type exclamations in that lower-left panel there.



Also note that in addition to being quite witty, the dialogue here really accords well with the art. This is exactly how you would expect Ludwig to sound, based on his expressions.

Oh, yeah, the idea here is that Ludwig is gonna use his rocket to get to his college reunion.



There is no context in which I would not find the phrase "I made you some swell cheese sandwiches" funny, but somehow, the fact that here the word "swell" is being employed in a self-consciously anachronistic way makes it even more so.



They accidentally launch themselves to the Moon, as is known to occur. Ludwig's smaller-fonted, rambly asides really hit the spot. You may recall Brainerd Brainmore as the hapless physicist from "The Swamp of No Return."



In all seriousness, for totally unrealistic cartoon space travel here, this isn't half bad, and seems to predict the actual moon landings in a not-wholly-outlandish way.



...and here's a cute li'l shout-out to "The Twenty-Four-Carat Moon."



...proof that he landed on the moon, that is. Now that's funny, even if Ludwig appears to be insulting himself along with all those other scientists.



Hurray! Note that the business with Ludwig forgetting about Mickey is a running gag throughout.

It could justly be said that Mickey doesn't really do much of anything here, but in this case--as previously noted--his blandness works in the story's favor. He's basically just here for Ludwig to bounce dialogue off of. Stick a more volatile character like Donald in the Mickey role, and Ludwig immediately has to share the spotlight. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing, depending on what you were going for, but the present dynamic works beautifully.

I am on the record as wishing that Boom had done prestige-format books; now that, to all appearances, they soon won't be doing much of anything Disney-related (the recently-announced cancellation of the "Atombrella and the Rhyming Man" one-shot absolutely breaks my heart), I suppose I should have counted my blessings. I'll say this, though: while I still think prestige-format is the way to go, when you only have a few stories per issue, you do appreciate each individual story more. Of course, for this to work, the stories actually have to be good, but Boom's done pretty well on that front, giving us some real treasures in their brief tenure. And this is one of them. What can you say about a six-year-old comics publisher that lost its Disney license?