"Reform and Void"

Okay, HAPPY HALLOWEEN. Sorry to not have something more appropriate for today, but frankly, I think I've covered about all of the seasonal stories of much note that are available in English. There are a few that haven't been published in English that I'd like to get to (Elaine knows the ones), but my hope is that I'll be able to do them when IDW publishes them, AS THEY'D BE CRAZY NOT TO.

So apparently, sometime in the nineties, somebody who was working on the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip (Floyd Norman, I believe) convinced the syndicate to let them go back to doing serials, after a forty-odd year break. I KNOW I read an article on this somewhere.

At any rate, this happened. FINE, the syndicate said. You can HAVE your stupid serials. But NO LONGER THAN THREE WEEKS. We can't have total anarchy here. So there you go. Since these newspaper stories were never reprinted anywhere—you'd have to find a newspaper that had carried the strip and comb through their microfiche if you wanted to find them—so they had a certain mystique. Someone—I think it was Mathias DeRider of the possibly-defunct Review or Die

(who hopefully hasn't chosen the latter option)—was absolutely obsessed with the idea of seeing these things reprinted. Well, HERE ONE IS. In IDW's third issue! And...no one seems to really have paid it much heed. Well, I say that, but thinking about it, I'm not really sure where I'd expect that “heed” to come from. Joe Torcivia makes note of it here.

But regardless of who may or may not be paying attention, it is truly cool to see something so rare be reprinted! It's drawn by the late Rick Hoover, who did art for various Disney-published comics in the early nineties, and written by Colette Bezio. Who?  This is who—she benefits from having an extremely googleable name.

As for the story itself, it features the return of Professors Ecks and Doublex from “Blaggard Castle.” Well, they already had returned—but not in the US, let alone in newspaper form! Or at least, that's what I was going to say, but inducks reveals that they had already been in post-Gottfredson newspaper strips, including a few written by Bezio. And yet, this one indicates that it's meant to be the first time Mickey is meeting the professors since the original story. The chronology here seems screwy. I suppose we can just call this a prequel to those earlier follow-ups—though it kind of neuters whatever suspense there may have been in their alleged reformedness (okay, so there was never actually any suspense—but more on that later).

And what happened to the legendary Professor Triplex? Well, that's for me to not know and you to not find out. Best guess is that it was just considered unworkable to have three separate guest characters all at once in the confines of the newspaper real estate of the nineties (which was of course much more limited than what Gottfredson had to work with). But looking on inducks, I can see that this isn't the first time the third professor has been excluded, so maybe there's more to it. This seems like a bit of a stretch, but perhaps some editors somewhere were skittish about the possible porny overtones of the name.

Anyway, we get some gag strips of the professors helping, or “helping,” Mickey. It's all decent fun—I really enjoy them insulting his cooking there—and Hoover renders them well. Obviously, the restraints of the modern-day comics page—and those imposed by the syndicate—precluded any sort of really epic storyline, but if you had been an old-school fan seeing these in the paper when they first came out, I think it is fair to say that you would have been well chuffed.

In this segment, though, Mickey certainly doesn't get any points for his ostentatiously rude attitude. I mean, I know this is just doing the MICKEY IS ADVENTUROUS thing, where writers feel compelled to go HOLY SHIT MICKEY IS ADVENTUROUS; HE IS SO FUCKING ADVENTUROUS THAT IF YOUR FEEBLE MIND WERE CAPABLE OF GRASPING THE FULL ADVENTUROUS EXTENT OF HIS ADVENTUROUSNESS IT WOULD JUST TURN IN ON ITSELF AND SELF-DESTRUCT CREATING A CHAIN REACTION THAT WOULD DEVOUR ALL MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE FROM SHEER DISBELIEF THAT THIS LEVEL OF ADVENTUROUSNESS CAN EXIST. DID I SAY “ADVENTUROUS” YET? In fairness, this started with Gottfredson himself; everyone else is just following his lead. And yet, it has always seemed clumsy and forced to me. Show don't tell, guys. Or at least make the telling a little subtler.

At any rate, the point is that here that aesthetic has led to our hero behaving rather dickishly. He's just trying to show you a fun time, dude. You could try to seem at least a little appreciative.

Aww. I mean, seriously, aww. Don't you just want to give them a big ol' hug? They come across as genuinely likable here, which is kind of too bad, given what we know is going to happen...

Note also that for a story created in such a constrained space, there's quite a good level of detail here.  Good on Hoover.

Aw, that's fun! And even in-character for the professors, if you remember then playing “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” post-reform in “Blaggard Castle!”

...and yes, well. I must admit, there were a few brief fleeting moments when I thought that maybe this wasn't an inevitability, but, of course, it was. I am not one hundred percent certain whether the “cleaning ray” they had in the beginning is meant to have been foreshadowing (they mention a “dry cleaning ray” a few panels after this, but is that the same thing?); still, I choose to believe it was. Well done there. It's too bad, though, and not just for the reasons I'm about to get into, but also because Ecks and Doublex are so darned likable before this happens. But I think there's a very large extent to which a writer—any writer; I'm not just picking on Bezio here—would, in a case like this, simply be unable to conceptualize what the point of the story could possibly be if the former villains don't revert to villainousness. There may be a certain collective failure of imagination here.

Now...we could easily get very deep into the weeds here, but it's probably fair to say that there has never been a major Disney-comics character who has not at some point had his or her personality altered by hypnosis or being bashed on the head or some dern thing or other. And in all of this, no one ever seems to be aware that this is a heavy philosophical question: if you're—for instance—“bad” and your brain gets scrambled so you become “good,” are you nonetheless still in some foundational, bedrock sense “bad?” Anyone writing a story relying on this trope is, however consciously, putting forth an argument—and that argument is pretty much invariably “yes, you still are bad. No one can truly change.” Yes, of course, there's an obvious reason for this that has nothing to do with philosophy: pragmatically, you can't just go around permanently changing regular characters' polarity willy nilly. Maybe that bespeaks a certain fundamental conservatism in the genre (paging Dorfman and Mattelart).

This is especially noticeable with the professors, because at the end of “Blaggard Castle,” Gottfredson argued: yes, they are permanently changed (yes, no doubt he felt free to do this in part because he wasn't thinking of them as repeat players, but I like to think it still bespeaks an admirable level of humaneness)—while every single future writer to use the characters has shouted in unison NO THEY'RE NOT (in all fairness, I don't actually know that this is the case, not having read every single thing they've appeared in, but I'd bet dollars to dalmatians that it is). So in this case, it's not just a matter of returning to the status quo as established by Gottfredson; it's actively overturning it, and even if the reason is more a matter of “these guys make fun villains” than anything deeper, it still sends the message it sends. It's not a position I agree with, and I find the inevitability of something like this denouement kind of depressing. Still, given how totally expected it is, I suppose I can't ding the story too much for it—for being what it was never not going to be.

And...the bad guys lose due to zero effort on the good guys' parts. Look, I understand the exigencies of working in this format, but regardless of the context, there's nothing that's going to make this non-lame. I'm also disturbed that—with this and “The Mysterious Crystal Ball”—the apparent theme of this issue is “Mickey is useless and engages in no meaningful action.”

Still, this isn't really an adventure story, so the lack of action on the protagonist's part doesn't really hurt it like it does the other, and, in spite of my philosophical differences, I would be all set to label this story a trivial but amusing oddity. Unfortunately, I find I can't really say that after its remarkably mean-spirited ending, which makes the whole thing kinda turn to ash in my mouth:

So...we are aware that—unless you're in solitary confinement, a deeply cruel punishment that literally drives people insane—prison isn't a medieval-dungeon-like place where you are allowed no entertainment, right? This doesn't seem like terribly esoteric knowledge, even if it is what you believe when you're eight years old. You can almost certainly read and write and play sports and, yes, videogames, too.  At the very least, shouldn't we all have some idea of this from the many times the Beagles have used skills gained in prison for villainous purposes?

Of course, you can point to plenty of stories that end with the villains unhappily behind bars that certainly look like they have nothing to do except rot away. But there is a very big difference between those and a story that goes out of its way to say “haw haw—they thought they were so smart that they were going to have FUN in prison, like those stoopid libruls want [unwarrantedly political?—well, maybe, but a large part of why this bothers me is the way it resonates with the philosophy of the “tough on crime” crowd], but we MADE SURE they'd get the full punishment they deserve! Stupid criminals not so smart after all!”

Just LOOK at those goddamn vapidly-smiling faces in the last panel.  LOOK AT THEM.

 LOOK:

AAAAAHHH!

That is literally the stuff of nightmares for me—our genial, authoritarian Officer Friendly and his like-minded crony taking delight in crushing their victims—and expecting the audience to be complicit in this delight. This is not a light in which I enjoy seeing these characters, to put it mildly. You know, I'm probably loading more symbolic weight on this sucker than it can really bear, but the fact that Gottfredson's story ends with the bad guys turned good, whereas this one ends with the alleged good guys revealing their true nature and being imprisoned in this sadistic way as punishment—well, it's noticeable, is all I'll say about that.

LET IT BE NOTED, however, that, in spite of everything, I would be extremely interested to see more reprints of these latterday MM serials. I just hope they turn out to be a bit less, uh, problematic.