Disney Comics History
Disney comics had their beginnings in 1930,
when Walt Disney began writing a Mickey Mouse daily comic strip for
newspapers. That same year the creative chores on the strip shifted
from Disney and artist Ub Iwerks to Floyd Gottfredson. The strip did
so well that an entire comic strip department was created at the
Walt Disney studio, producing additional strips such as Donald Duck
and Silly Symphonies (both featuring the work of Al Taliaferro).
1935 saw Disney Associates Kay Kamen and Hal
Horne take advantage of the growing comics industry and began
publishing Mickey Mouse Magazine, which featured reprints of
the daily strips. Eventually production of the magazine was
entrusted to Western Publishing and, in 1939, they began publishing
a series of one-shots titled Four Color, which also contained
reprints of the daily strips. In 1940, when an all Donald Duck issue
was a great success, Mickey Mouse Magazine was re-invented as
an official monthly comic entitled Walt Disney's Comics And
Stories.
Dated October 1940, the first issue of WDC&S
featured Donald Duck on the front cover but continued the Mickey
serial from Mickey Mouse Magazine, "Mickey Meets Robinson
Crusoe." The early issues contained mostly daily strip reprints and
short gags, except for the Mickey strip by Gottfredson, which had a
long run in the 1930s (Gottfredson is still considered by many to be
the best Mickey Mouse artist). Over the years, dozens of characters
have appeared in the book and on the cover, although Donald Duck has
been on most of them. The book was usually made up of two or more
feature stories, two or more text-and-picture stories, one or two
puzzle pages, maybe a contest, and a Table of Contents (64 pages of
story and art plus covers, monthly. They sure knew how to do it back
then).
Issue #31 (April 1943) introduced the first of
over 250 ten-page Donald Duck stories by the legendary Carl Barks.
Barks had produced "Pluto Saves the Ship" (1941) and "Donald Duck
Finds Pirate Gold" (1942) as one-shots for the publisher, and it was
apparent then that he was a multi-talented creator. During this
period, due in part to Barks' talent as well as a dwindling number
of strips available to reprint, the title shifted from mostly strip
reprints to original material, ushering in the salad days for WDC&S
that lasted well into the 1950s. Year after year, Barks produced an
incredible array of stories for the publisher including the "Donald
Duck Christmas" special (which introduced his most famous character
Uncle Scrooge in 1947). Barks also premiered many of his most fondly
remembered characters in issues of WDC&S, like #88
(January, 1948, the first Gladstone Gander), #125 (February 1951,
the first Junior Woodchucks), #140 (May 1952, the first Gyro
Gearloose), and #134 (November 1951, the first Beagle Boys - one
panel appearance).
Years before he joined the Disney Studio, Carl
Barks had worked for the adult humor magazine The Calgary
Eye-Opener, and had collaborated on a one-shot with
Eye-Opener editor Ed Summer in 1932. This one shot, titled
"Coo-Coo", which was distributed in extremely small quantities and
to which Barks contributed many of the gags, shows that Barks' was
an enormous talent even then.
In 1962, Dell ended their agreement with
Western to distribute their comics (which they had been doing for
decades), which led to the creation of Gold Key Comics. It was
during this period that WDC&S began its long decline, due in
part to lower quality of the material when compared to Barks'
strips. The title continued to decline in popularity and was finally
laid to rest in 1984.