Sorry for the delay

I hope posts will resume soon; I've been preoccupied with various non-Disney-related things, as well as one possibly self-indulgent but possibly interesting Disney thing that you will see by and by.  Anyway, stay tuned.

I'm not sure if I actually need to tell this to anyone who reads this blog...

...but if you haven't, you really ought to check out our friend Joe Torcivia's lavish overview of the history of Dell's successor, Gold Key.  Great stuff.

As I noted in comments over there, what I find most striking is the idea that Disney comics started to suffer during the late sixties and seventies because Disney was poaching talent for their Studio Program, which produced stories for overseas publication (the best known being the Hubbard/Kinney Fethry stories and those forty-four page "Goofy as historical figure" things).  The whole thing just seems like such a clusterfuck: it's not just a matter of "why the HELL wouldn't it occur to anybody that it would be good for the US market to make arrangements to also release the high-quality stuff here?; it's more a matter of "how the hell was that not the default impulse?"  I guess the answer is just that Gold Key knew they could pay less to worse artists in exchange for shittier work--but that is just such an unbelievably stupid, shortsighted, toxic, self-destructive attitude that I kinda want to refuse to believe it.

But enough negativity from me.  Gold Key certainly released some good stuff (and by no means just Disney material, either), and even when they didn't it's interesting history.  So, again: check it out.

"Bobo the Elephant"

(This being part four of a nine-part series covering the stories in Volume Three of Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson Library.)
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"The Bat Bandit of Inferno Gulch"

(This being part three of a nine-part series covering the stories in Volume Three of Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson Library.)
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"Pluto's Rival"

(This being part two of a nine-part series covering the stories in Volume Three of Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson Library.)
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"The Captive Castaways"

(This being part one of a nine-part series covering the stories in Volume Three of Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson Library.)
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Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.

Well, you'll be the judge of that.  Fact is, I've been, naturally, acquainting myself with the third Fantagraphics mouse book, and kinda marveling about just how damned good it is.  I'd read most of these stories before--Gladstone I reprinted all but one of them--but seeing them in chronological, concentrated form like this really makes me realize: damn.  Floyd was on fire.  What a spectacular run.

Problem is, I was having trouble deciding which one to write about, since there are lots of interesting things to say about all of 'em.  So ultimately, I decided, fuck it: I'm declaring this the Summer of Mickey and writing about all them sumbitches.  Nine entries total.  I don't have an exact timetable, but you can expect to see them all sooner or later, starting tomorrow with "Captive Castaways."

("Look at your masthead, asshole!  'Duck Comics Revue!'  Judas!  Hope you're enjoying your thirty pieces of silver!"  To which I can only say A) Yes.  B) Donald's in one of them, so calm the fuck down.  C) If anyone would like to give me some actual pieces of silver as opposed to these useless figurative ones, I wouldn't say no.)

Straight-up chillaxin' on the Zambezi River

Those are hippos you can barely see in the background.  More stuff in the future, including our traditional effort to spotlight/promote the newly-released Gottfredson book.