Taliaferro

[Sue and Gary Leach]

Al Taliaferro always presented something of a poser to Gladstone. I never
thought that the attempts we made to produce comic book pages from his
Donald Duck comic strips worked very well, though from a production
standpoint they were very easy to do. Eventually we faced the fact that
Taliaferro's strips were best appreciated for what they were: short, snappy,
largely visual gags, and finished off by printing his strips as strips ‹
though that was a bit more difficult to set up for comic books than
reformatting them. 

The plot driven Mickey Mouse adventure strips by Floyd Gottfredson (& Co.)
were another matter entirely. They made terrific comic book stories, though
I must say they were a royal pain to put together for our late, lamented
Gladstone I run of the Mickey Mouse title.

Heaven, of course, would have been if Taliaferro (and Gottfredson) had taken
up comic books as Barks and Murry did, leaving a nice body of true comic
book work we could have drawn from at our relative leisure. Such things as
dreams are made of, I guessŠ

(Some may wonder why we didn't draw more from Murry than we did, and I must
say I still wonder myself.)

Gary