Sunday, September 30, 2012

Tuscan History Week

People who've read this story will instantly know what I'm talking about; those who haven't, won't.  This may come to be known as my crowning folly, but for better or worse, here it is.  I've been so close to this damn thing for so long that I am very thankful to be getting it out there, thus exorcising it from my system.
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Friday, September 28, 2012

Now, Krazy Kat--there's a comic For Real Men Only!

There's an article from the seventies by the late Bill Blackbeard, reprinted in MM3, called "Mickey Mouse & the Phantom Artist."  Here's the opening:


I cannot read this without shouting "citation needed!" at regular intervals.  There's this idea here that the MM comic was some sort of marginalized, embattled entity that adults, in their arrogant ignorance, simply dismissed unread as "kids' stuff."  But…is there any actual evidence of this?  Like, whatsoever?  We're really supposed to imagine all these Adults thrilling to Flash Gordon and Popeye and Terry and the Pirates, but then they came to Mickey Mouse and thought, WHOA WHOA WHOA, a MOUSE?!?  I'm not going to get the super-ultra-mature adults-only excitement that I crave from a strip about a mouse!  Fuck that shit!  I mean, maybe that's how it worked in the Blackbeard household, but in general…?

…well, let's just say, I have my doubts.  So, for the record, does Geoffrey Blum, who, in his article on "Sheriff of Nugget Gulch," asserts that

On Sundays Gottfredson did not so much relax his narrative standards as alter them because the stories were written for a special audience.  Boys and girls who might shy clear of the more adult cartoon buried in their father's daily paper would grab at the colorful Sunday section.

Fight! Fight!

Of course, this is so much trivial nitpicking ("ah, so pretty much the usual thing, then?"), but I can't say I'm a huge fan of the slightly smug/chiding oh-those-benighted-adults tone in Blackbeard's article, especially as it seems to me to almost certainly be based on a wholly erroneous assumption. 

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

"The Pirate Submarine"

(This being part nine of a nine-part series covering the stories in Volume Three of Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson Library.)
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Saturday, September 22, 2012

"Race for Riches"

(This being part eight of a nine-part series covering the stories in Volume Three of Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson Library.)
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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

"The Golden Throne Legend"

Hey folks; sorry about the recent radio silence on this end.  I've had various non-Disney-related things to attend to (shocking, I know).  I do have some interesting stuff planned for the near-ish future, including those last two Gottfredson entries (though at this point, we seem to be ramming head-on into the fourth volume's release).  But right now, it is necessary to say one thing:
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Monday, September 3, 2012

Here, have a Labor Day present.

I scanned this a while ago; I don't know why I'm just throwing it up here now, but regardless, here's the English version of Carpi's "War & Peace." Cheers.