Like an aged prizefighter greeting tourists in a casino lobby, poor ol' Mickey Mouse -- still the world's most universally recognized fictional character -- has got little to do these days but wear a tux and tails and welcome people to places imagineered to cost them serious money.
But once upon a time he was more mouse than logo. As you can see on every page of Fantagraphics' gorgeous new collection Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley, the young Mickey was a brash, spirited, resourceful, and endlessly charming character, a pluckish everymouse adventuring through life one scrape -- and one daily comic strip -- at a time. Poring over this book is like swimming in the very headwaters of popular American culture.
Mostly drawn and written by the great Floyd Gottfredson, the daily-newspaper adventures collected in Race to Death Valley pick up in 1930, just two years after Mickey's debut in Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks' Steamboat Willie short. (This volume is the first in a series planned to collect all of Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse work.)
This Mickey is a mystery-solving, prize-fighting, suicide-contemplating, mischief-making, wolf-spanking mouse of the people.
We mean that about suicide.
According to the helpful notes throughout the book, the story in which Mickey considers killing himself was the idea of Walt Disney himself. The payoff strip -- which involves the life-affirming hilariousness of frolicking squirrels -- is alone worth the price of the book.
Also, like all real Americans, this Mickey is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.
He's worldly.
Gottfredson's early work is all galloping invention and intricate horseplay. It's chases, escapes, cliffhangers, sight gags, Groucho Marx wisecracks, and Horatio Alger fortune-making. But then it's small-town comedy, with Mickey opening a miniature golf course or playing matchmaker for cows or giving a grizzled con a Pygmalion once-over.
This Mickey is pugnacious.
He consorts with moonshiners.
In short, this Mickey is a scrappy, appealing hero who has as little to do with the squeaky-clean brand-figurehead Mickey of today as Jefferson Airplane did with Starship. Page after page, Gottfredson's sprightly mouse surprises and delights. Mickey -- and Gottfried's fluid linework -- seems as fresh and energetic as the American century itself, even in the early days of the Depression.
At the edict of Disney, Gottfredson (who would draw Mickey Mouse for newspapers until 1975) had begun to refashion the daily Mickey comic as an adventure serial. "Race to Death Valley," Gottfredson's first go at it, is a breathless dash through adventure cliches, as Mickey and Minnie compete with crooks to reach the abandoned gold mine on a treasure map bequeathed to Minnie.
Here's how hectic it gets:
Yes, he's clinging to the last hair in the tail of a horse clutching a barrel tied to a rope on the edge of a waterfall. And check out his high-heeled boots!
My favorite strip in the book comes smack in the middle of such hurly burly. After many travails, Mickey and Minnie and the treasure map find a moment of respite, even as they -- and the plot -- chug forward:
Click on it, blow it up, and savor.
Here, Gottfredson hints at the achievement of the book's later strips, and of the ones to come in Fantagraphics' upcoming volumes. The scope is epic, the art is beautiful, the world is in motion, but the focus is intimate: our hero and our heroine, all smiles and noodly arms, milking a goat and dancing.
Mickey Mouse: Race to Death Valley stands beside Fantagraphics' collections of E.C. Segar's Popeye and Charles Schulz's Peanuts as a treasure of modern American culture -- a reminder that, once in a while, the most popular thing is the best thing.
Follow Alan Scherstuhl at @studiesincrap or SF Weekly's Exhibitionist blog @ExhibitionistSF on the Twitter thing.
