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.
