Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol 12: "The Mysterious Dr. X" (DISNEY MICKEY MOUSE HC)

Floyd Gotfredson was the "Carl Barks" of Mickey Mouse. Floyd drew and wrote Mickey Mouse adventures for about 40 years. His were the best and were suitable for both children and adults. Highly recommended.

Uneven quality of the scripts in this volume of the series. Superb ones together with and pedestrian ones. But Gottfredson's work is uniformly excellent throughout, as always.

When Fantagraphics first started reprinted the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comics I was giving each volume 5 stars. However, as time went on the luster began to wear off. The stories became increasingly silly and childish. I was hoping Eega Beeva would be the low point but when Beeva left things failed to improve. Walsh just kept creating Eega Beeva like characters including two in this volume. We have a magical leprechaun named Gilhooley and another creature named Wing Ding who is a near clone of Eega Beeva. It’s not uncommon for comic strip writers to not fully plot out long storylines but it really feels like Bill Walsh is making it up day by day with no real plan and it does not lend itself to great storytelling. In fact, the storytelling is frequently awful.I tend to be very lenient with these collections because I always respect a publisher that brings back classic comics even if they don’t necessarily stand the test of time. Fantagraphics does a great job on presentation although this volume is probably the lightest on extras, as far as I can recall. The main problem is the overall tone of the book. The whole weird/surreal stream of consciousness writing just doesn’t feel appropriate for Mickey Mouse. I don’t get the impression that Walsh was trying to be innovative or outlandish. It just feels like lazy writing. In one story Mickey is kidnapped by a large cloaked figure and a letter tells him he’s being taken to a mysterious Uncle Maxwell. When he arrives, Uncle Maxwell seems completely ignorant as to who Mickey is or what is happening. In the next strip it dawns on him that he DOES remember Mickey and was the one who sent for him. It makes no sense unless Maxwell is completely brain dead.In the next story, a mysterious character is decorating Mouseville with flowers and secretly doing people’s daily chores. Turns out it’s Wing Ding who can travel underground in his Earthaplane. He takes Mickey on an adventure underground but it leaves open the question of why the heck was Wing Ding decorating Mouseville. Once Mickey meets Wing Ding none of the previous stuff is mentioned and it’s pretty clear that Walsh had no plan. I was actually intrigued by the Dr. X story and Walsh set up a bunch of interesting mysteries. The problem is that none of the mysteries were resolved. Either Walsh forgot them or had no way to connect the beginning of the story to what happened later. Even the writers of the chapter introductions seem exasperated by Walsh’s writing.I’m giving this book four stars based solely on the art of Floyd Gottfredson and the presentation by Fantagraphics because the storytelling is just awful. This is some of the worst writing I have ever seen in a classic comic collection. I actually didn’t think the story with Li’l Davy (Crockett) was that bad but it was the fourth story in this volume where Mickey has to handle a difficult to control guest in his house. So much for creativity. The Li’l Davy story is the final Mickey Mouse story yet the book continues. We get a Three Little Pigs tale, a Cinderella tale and Bambi. After these non-Disney stories Mickey does return in future comics but never again would he do long storylines. From here on out it’s the gag a day. I have no idea if Fantagraphics is going to be reprinting these as there are no more books scheduled. If this is the finale it’s certainly not going out on top.

Gottfredson es un genio, creador fantástico de historietas Disney clásicas. Esta colección es todo un lujo. Bien editadas, buena encuadernación.