The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse by Jim Korkis

Mickey Mouse comic strip, said:
    With Mickey Mouse in fewer than thirty newspapers, both companies realized that Mickey’s time was nearing the end of a long and successful run. Over the year the Mickey strip had grown old and stodgy. The strip was not funny, nor was it allowed to be funny. With scrappy little Mickey reduced to an animated Ozzie Nelson it was no wonder the strip was on its last legs.
    I don’t think anybody even noticed the strip was no longer being published. Times had changed and media had seen a revolution. Yet, I think Mickey could have survived the revolution had we only had creative leadership that would allow us to take the mouse in a bold new direction (of short adventure stories like in the early days). Personally, I think Mickey would have survived. However, this is something we’ll probably never know.

id="9H5K2">Born May 5, 1905, cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson was inducted as a Disney Legend in 2003 for his contributions over four-and-a-half decades to the Mickey Mouse comic strip.
    He started drawing the Mickey Mouse comic strip on May 5, 1930, and drew his last Sunday strip on September 19, 1976, and his last daily strip on November 15, 1976.
    In 2011, Fantagraphics Publications began releasing a multi-volume prestige format book series with reprints of Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse comic strip. Edited by Mickey Mouse expert David Gerstein and publisher Gary Groth, the books contain not only the comic strips themselves but important and entertaining supplemental material. When the first volume was released in 2011, Gerstein said:
    Instead of seeing Mickey as a cheerful, but one-dimensional character — like a lot of people do — Gottfredson portrayed him as this stubbornly optimistic, determined, two-fisted young guy trying to prove himself in wild, adventurous situations. Floyd called Mickey “a mouse against the world.”
    Mickey’s brave, witty, imaginative and incredibly daring in Gottfredson’s stories. He’s a scrapper, ready to fight for what he believes in; but he’s not always right about what he thinks is right, so he can create a mess for himself and have to do some great soul-searching afterwards.
    Gottfredson’s work influenced many artists. He once recalled:
    I’ve always felt that it was our job to try to capture the spirit of animation… I tried to design the characters as if they were moving in animation.
    I interviewed Floyd Gottfredson in fall 1979 for an article, “The Mouse Man”, that I wrote in issue #6 of the Disney-oriented fanzine, The Duckburg Times .
    I later used some of the interview for a series of introductions that I wrote for the UnCensored Mouse comic book collections that reprinted early public domain Mickey Mouse comic strips. That short-lived project was published by Malibu Graphics in 1989.
    KORKIS: How did you decide to apply at the Disney Studios?
    GOTTFREDSON : Looking for another job, I went to Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, California, where all the film exchanges were and one of them had a one-sheet Mickey Mouse movie poster standing in front of it. As a projectionist in Utah, I had run all of Walt’s Oswald the Lucky Rabbit animated cartoons so I was familiar with the Disney name but I had never seen or heard of Mickey Mouse before.
    Out of curiosity, I went in and the fellow o Vand I started talking and he told me he had heard that Walt was going to New York the following week to look for artists. I lost no time in putting together my samples and rushing out to the Disney Studio which was then located on Hyperion Avenue. I figured I would get the jump on the fellows who might be applying in New York since I was already there in Los Angeles.
    Korkis: Did you get to meet Walt?
    Gottfredson : Walt himself looked over my samples and asked me what sort of work I was interested in doing and I told him I wanted to do comic strips. Well, at that time, Disney wasn’t doing any comic strips. Walt was quite a salesman. He told me I