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

didn’t want to get involved in doing comic strips because it was a rat race.
    He said that the future would be animation and he was so convincing that I said, “Fine. Do you have any openings in animation?” And he said, “Sure, we’ll put you in as an in-betweener.”
    Then he said that he and Ub Iwerks were just beginning to put together a Mickey Mouse comic strip for King Features and that it would be good to have me around as a back-up man in case they needed some help.
    Korkis: Did you start working at Disney immediately?
    Gottfredson : I went to work the following day, December 19, 1929. I was 24 years old and had been married for five years. I had been earning $65 a week as a projectionist and Walt was offering $18 a week but I took it because he had really convinced me that animation was the future. I did some free-lance cartooning on the side by mail and within eight months I was making more than I made as a projectionist. 
    Korkis: What did you do as an in-betweener?
    Gottfredson : I only worked about four months in animation as an in-betweener. I did in-between work for Johnny Cannon and later Dave Hand and Wilfred Jackson. I even did a few in-betweens for Ub Iwerks.
    It was all work for the Silly Symphonies . Norm Ferguson and Dave Hand gave me a little piece of animation to do on Cannibal Capers (1930). It was a lion running out of the jungle and a cannibal beating on a drum. That was really the only animation I ever did but it worked out pretty well and I was just fascinated with animation.
    Korkis: How did you finally end up with the Mickey Mouse comic strip?
    Gottfredson : The Mickey Mouse comic strip debuted in January 13, 1930, with Walt doing the writing and Ub penciled them and an artist named Win Smith was doing the inking. After the first eighteen strips, Ub left and Win took over the penciling and the inking. The strip was straight gags adapted from the Mickey Mouse movie cartoons.
    King Features wanted continuity, that is to say, they wanted the strip to have a story and a plot because other strips like Sidney Smith’s The Gumps were very popular being “story strips”. Walt tried to convince Win to take over the writing and Win kept stalling but I don’t know why. Finally, Walt met with him and told him he was going to take over the writing and Win who had a short fuse wasn’t going to be told what to do and so he quit. He came by my desk and said, “I think you’ve got a new job”.
    Korkis: So it was as simple as that?
    Gottfredson : About a half hour later, Walt called me into his office and asked me whether I would like to take over doing the strip. By now I had become very interested in animation and was reluctant to change. I told Walt that he was right and that I would prefer to stay with animation. Well, Walt was quite a salesman. He told me to just take the strip for two weeks to give him some time to find anh�tist.
    I wanted to help out so I agreed. After all, he had told me that part of my job was to be a possible back-up on the strip. At the end of a month, I wondered if he was really seriously looking for anyone. After two months, I began to worry that he might actually find someone because I was enjoying doing it and wanted to continue with it.
    Nothing more was ever said about it and I continued to draw the Mickey daily strip for about forty-five and a half years until my retirement on October 1, 1975.
    Korkis: When did your first strip appear?
    Gottfredson : My first strip appeared May 5, 1930, and the strip had gone into continuities April 1, 1930. Walt had written a story about Mickey finding a treasure map to a gold mine in Death Valley. To help me get started, Walt continued to write about two weeks’ worth of strips for me to draw and then I took over the writing on May 19 in the middle of the story and continued to write the daily until 1932 when five different writers took over writing the continuities.
    Korkis: How closely did the comic strip follow the animated