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Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #24

Hey everybody, sorry I skipped my column for the last month. Reading comics and saying what you think about them is hard work.

Hey everybody,

Sorry I skipped my column for the last month. Reading comics and saying what you think about them is hard work. I've been reviewing comics for the Comics Journal's website on the side. The commenters on that site really get mad when I call women bitches. They also don’t like that I can’t write good. You can check out my review of Sam Kieth's Arkham Asylum: Madness, as well as my review of Mike Allred's new Madman Special on their site. Although they are both heroes of mine, I wrote primarily negative reviews that left me emotionally drained. What's wrong with me?

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Here's some recent comic news.

1) Gene Colan died on June 23rd at the age of 84. He drew Howard the Duck, Daredevil, Captain America, Dr. Strange, Detective Comics, and a bunch of others.

2) Green Lantern is out in theaters and made a lot of money. I like Green Lantern, but I have no interest in this movie. The trailers look like a mess of green CGI fire with Ryan Reynolds’s head bobbling around on a fake body inside a totally fake universe full of fake-looking characters.

3) The trailer for the Captain America movie is floating around, and except for the corny rock music and explosions, it looks like it could be pretty good. These superhero movies that involve transformation always suffer when they're about a team or when there's some big mythology that needs to be explained before we even know if we give a fuck about what's on the screen. That’s probably why the X-Men movies weren't all that great. I mean, they were fine as adaptations of a comic about a giant group of people, but as movies they weren't quite as interesting as Spiderman or Iron Man, because it's hard to make the audience care about a whole group of people in 90 minutes.

4) Ron Howard is supposedly going to direct a live-action Spy vs. Spy movie. How the fuck do you make a movie out of a series of one page wordless gags? Did we learn NOTHING from Night at the Roxbury?!

5) Frank Miller made a new comic called Holy Terror, which was originally supposed to be about Batman fighting Al Qaeda. He announced it in 2006, saying the idea was that Al Qaeda attacks Gotham City and Batman kicks their asses. DC wasn't so into this comic, but it happened anyway, although now there's a generic Batman-ish character instead of Batman, and some other company is putting it out.

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Frank pointed out that people shouldn't be offended or bothered by Batman beating up Al Qaeda, since comics used to show superheroes punching out Hitler on their front covers.

6) I don't know if this is the BEST collection of Spiderman meme images, but it’s pretty good. I’m thinking about doing a show of watercolor paintings of all the Spiderman meme images and calling it, “Ya'll Niggas Posting in a Spiderman Thread.” Who will host this showing of Internet art?

Enough news. Now it’s time for reviews. Listed from best to worst, here are my thoughts on some books I read. Send anything you want reviewed in this column to VICE's Brooklyn office and put my name, NICK GAZIN, on it or the interns will probably steal it. Maybe draw a picture of an intern being executed on the envelope to help hammer the point home.

Nicholas Gazin
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#1
Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: Race To Death Valley
By Floyd Gottfredson
Fantagraphics

Fantagraphics fucking whip ass at knowing what a beautiful book is. Using the clout they earned by producing the most perfectly presented Peanuts books ever, they slingshotted themselves into this deal with Disney to publish the early, early Mickey Mouse comics. For at least 50 years now Mickey Mouse has been primarily relegated to the position of spokesmouse and speechless T-shirt graphic. The Mickey Mouse in this collection is a dynamic teenager with a whole lot of strong feelings, and it's both awesome and foreign to see him get mad or feel suicidal.

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The book collects the first couple years worth of daily Mickey Mouse comics made by Floyd Gottfredson during 1931 and 1932. The comics tell serialized stories that ended up spanning months. They’re adventurous yarns that are also plenty gagful. The title of the first story arc (which is also the title of the book) nails home the point that these stories are about more than a little mouse who points to the time on your watch. A title like Race To Death Valley let's you know you're in store for action and peril.

The first storyline involves Minnie inheriting her uncle's goldmine. Her evil lawyer immediately tries to kidnap and rob Minnie and Mickey. Meanwhile, a cloaked mystery man called The Fox aids them. The next story sees Minnie spending time with a ratty-looking mouse man and Mickey spending a couple weeks trying to kill himself in a variety of hilarious manners. The couple of panels where Mickey tries to kill himself with a shotgun are pretty surprising. In another story Mickey spends some time in high society with his ex-con friend, Butch. This one ends with the two of them discussing their responsibilities, seeing a sign for a circus, and running at it with giant smiles on their faces without saying a word to each other. I can't sum up how happy this sequence makes me. Take a look:

Fantagraphics are masters at collecting and presenting old comics. Some companies think you can shove a bunch of old comics in between an ugly new cover and trundle it into stores. That only works if you want to sell comics to the same old creeps. This volume not only presents comics that you probably haven't seen before, but it places them in the proper context with about 80 pages of supplementary writing, images, and in-depth explanations that could merit their own little volume.

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There are also a few prefaces and an explanation of who Floyd Gottfredson was. Then there are about 200 pages of comics with brief introductions that are mostly used to apologize for all the references to suicide or depictions of Mickey Mouse using guns.

After the comics there's a thorough explanation of the creation of Mickey Mouse, including pictures of the inspirations for the character and the very earliest sketches Ub Iwerks drew. There's a good article about how the strip got started, and then the very first story arc, “Plane Crazy,” which was actually written by Walt Disney and drawn by Ub Iwerks. The comic follows Mickey and his run-ins with wild beasts, a classic Disney skeleton, and hordes of offensive black island cannibals with pointy fingernails.

I was lucky enough to score an interview with David Gerstein, a professional Disney expert and all-around Mickey Mouse know-it-all. He co-edited this book with Fantagraphics editor Gary Groth and wrote several of the articles.

Nick: Who approached who about this book? Was it initially your idea?
David: I'd be honored to say it was, but that wouldn't be true. Plans for a collected Floyd Gottfredson Mickey actually began as early as 1984, when Another Rainbow/Gladstone wanted to put it out as a companion series to their Carl Barks Library. It was a natural idea, because Gottfredson was to Mickey what Barks was to the Ducks.

Sadly there was no way of doing Gottfredson back then, for a number of reasons—not least of which was the high cost of remastering the strips from Disney's decades-old tearsheets and negatives. Many of those weren't in the greatest condition.

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I was 10 years old at the time, though, so I had nothing to do with any of this. All I knew was that the project had been announced but didn't happen, and I dearly wished it could!

In 2006, I was working as Archival Editor with Gemstone Publishing—then the domestic Disney comics licensee—when I revived the project with Editor-in-Chief John Clark. The advent of Photoshop made cleaning up the old strips easier, and Ken Shue, Disney's VP of Graphic Art Development and a prince of a guy, worked extensively with me to get the master materials in order.

At the same time, the idea of doing Gottfredson had independently occurred to Fantagraphics. They approached me because I'd worked with them on an earlier Felix the Cat project, and we began discussing a Fantagraphics/Gemstone collaboration. It didn't happen then, though, because Gemstone top management preferred to do the project alone, and Gemstone already had the license.

But fate works in mysterious ways. Gemstone solicited the first volume in 2007, but had to postpone it several times before backing out of its Disney license entirely due to unrelated economic problems. This enabled Fantagraphics to seek Disney's permission, and they brought me onto the project as soon as they got it.

Why does this book begin with Floyd Gottfredson's run on Mickey instead of starting with the beginning of the comic strip?
Well, as I mentioned above, Gottfredson was to Mickey what Carl Barks was to the Ducks, and this is a collection of Gottfredson's Mickey—its official series title is The Floyd Gottfredson Library, after all, even if we promote the books under their individual volume titles.

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As the so-called "Mouse Man" (the title by which he's remembered), Floyd created a lot of classic co-stars for Mickey’s world, including the Phantom Blot and Eega Beeva, and these were complemented by his great characterizations of existing characters like Minnie, Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, Pegleg Pete, and especially Goofy.

Floyd’s greatest achievement, however, was his portrayal of Mickey himself. Instead of seeing the Mouse as a kind of dull, smiley-faced everyman—the way a lot of people seem to envision him—Floyd portrayed Mickey as what he called "a mouse against the world." He was a stubbornly optimistic, imperfect but determined youth trying to prove himself in a competitive, scary, adventurous place. Floyd gave Mickey length and depth.

So… what to do about those three months of strips before he got involved? We couldn't leave them out, because it's important to see the foundation on which he built—Walt himself scripted them, and they were drawn by Ub Iwerks, Walt's partner and Mickey's co-creator. But since Floyd had no involvement and the plotline itself was unrelated to the one Floyd started on, it didn't seem appropriate to open the book that way.

Disney is known for being hyper protective of Mickey Mouse. Was it hard getting their approval on anything that went into this book?
Disney was incredibly supportive of us, so I'd say no. Although there were a few conditions that they wanted to see met, and I was absolutely fine with that.

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The early Mickey comics were aimed at older readers rather than the target group for a lot of modern Disney products, so they include plenty of slapstick cartoon violence that we might typically associate with Looney Tunes.

Then—and this is typical of 1930s cartoons and comics in general—you'll also see some exaggerated ethnic images now and again—African natives who talk like southern hillbillies, for instance. Now to be fair, Gottfredson never used a straightforward stereotype. He could and did show his hillbilly Africans saving Mickey's life in 1932. But there's no getting around the fact that it's dated stuff and needs to be presented in context so it doesn't offend.

So essentially, Disney wanted to make sure we did that. They approved our publishing Gottfredson's work in full, but understandably asked us to include textual material that put the dated story elements in context.

Is there anything missing from this book that should have been in it?
Hmm, not a lot. We did shelve a couple of rather tangentially-related articles that we might end up using later, such as a look at period novelizations of Gottfredson's work.

Do you think Fantagraphics will ever get to reproduce Carl Barks’s comics featuring the Disney Ducks?
Wak! We're already there! I've only been tangentially involved, but Gary tells me Fantagraphics will be bringing out the first volume for the holidays. It's titled Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes. That's the famous "square egg" story from 1949, and it's the feature story in Fantagraphics's first volume.

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David Gerstein recently provided forewords and rare supplementary material in Boom! Studios's Walt Disney's Comics and Stories Archives Vol. 1 and Four-Color Adventures Vol 1, available now and soon, respectively. He also co-edited this, which is due for a fall release.

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#2
Mike Tyson's Punchout and A Long Day of Mr. James Teacher
Harvey James
Cailey Root

In the Mike Tyson zine, James replaced Iron Mike's lines from the beloved videogame with some of his bizarre statements and threats. “I'll fuck you till you love me, faggot!” And stuff like that.

The other comic is a hard copy of his comic about teaching English to Korean children and being miserable. We ran it in VICE a month or two ago. He spends his days by himself, surrounded by children who laugh at him, or with superior teachers who belittle him.

I've talked up Harvey to death. You should know who he is and why he is important by now.

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#3
Lari Pitman
Skira Rizzoli
This book sucks. I've never heard of Lari Pitman before but his or her paintings are these big Where's Waldo clusterfucks with jumbled and disorganized compositions in which every texture and ornamental pattern and type of line is employed. I enjoy being overwhelmed by a painting as much as anyone, but Pitman's work feels cluttered and noisy in a way that isn't exciting as much as it is distracting. It reminds me of the shittier Image comics artists of the early 90s who used pointless shading to distract from their lack of understanding. I get the sense that Lari Pitman is trying to blow my mind but I can't even tell if he/she knows how to draw.

I can see what people might like about the paintings collected in this book, though. They look like they were made to be hung over people's sofas. People want to buy big paintings that match their furniture and make them look interesting. These paintings are big and full of a bunch of crazy crap to look at. I could see a not very bright person with a lot of money buying one of the paintings in here and saying “I see something new every time I look at it.” That's because the artist didn't use any fucking restraint and tried to throw everything into every painting whether it made sense or not. I can't blame someone for making a living from their art if they find something that sells, but I sure as hell can't say it's good, either.

See you next week, I hope!

NICK GAZIN