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Mickey's badassery might not be the revelation that it was in the first volume, but in volume two the drawing is more consistent, the stories better shaped, and the adventure even grander. In the first volume -- unlike the Barks books, these are a chronological reprinting -- Gottfredson sometimes seemed to be writing two different strips, one the traditional funny talking-animal story, and the second a rip-roaring adventure.
Here, he fully integrates the comedy and the action elements. He hits a serious peak here, when -- in that can-you-top-this? fashion -- Mickey has been bound, gagged, shoved off a ship by mutineering pirates, only to land in a lifeboat occupied by a similarly bound gorilla:
Gottfredson relies on many of the adventure-story standbys that Barks does, but his cannibals, I'm sorry to say, are less dignified than even the ooga-booga caricatures of the Tarzan movies. These are huge-lipped tribesmen speaking dialogue right out of Uncle Remus. And earlier in the book, Mickey stages a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin in full-on blackface -- a powerful reminder of just how far away 1933 is from us today.
As disturbing as some of Gottfredson's strips are, Disney and Fantagraphics should be commended for hauling them from the vault. Neither the mouse nor the man fully transcended their age.
But, damn, both could pile on with the thrilling, impossible adventure. Here, just as his friend Horace Horsecollar is found guilty of a crime that he didn't commit and facing a bona fide lynching, Mickey leaps from an airplane with the real criminals in tow and literally parachutes into the courtroom -- clutching a money bag with a dollar sign on it!
This kids' stuff isn't for kids, either. But it's revealing and thrilling, both a guide to what's long been wrong with this country -- and what's great in its imagination.
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