Gottfredson's Mickey

Cord Wiljes cord at wiljes.de
Fri Jun 14 00:38:40 CEST 2002


David Gerstein wrote:

> I feel the same way about Gottfredson's Mickey. He is eternally
> rushing into dangerous adventures with a schoolboy's overenthusiasm- an
> optimism which, in truth, also functions as Mickey's knee-jerk defense
> against a very real self-doubt. The most important moments for Mickey are
> the moments when he realizes that he is trapped, or otherwise confronted by
> hopelessness, and he sees the dark side of the impulsiveness that brought
> him there. He is miserable; he is human. And yet, when the stress is done
> with, his adventurous impulse rises again. It's as if he searches for
> excitement, tries to dive into the largeness of the world, to dodge the fact
> that on the flip side, its sheer size can also intimidate him a little.
> What a wonderfully real person such a mouse can become.

If I had to attribute an age to Barks' Donald and Gottfredson's Mickey I would say:

Donald is an older teenager: He is moody, sometimes depressed, sometimes overconfident.
He thinks of himself as an adult but still acts childish in many ways. He knows how
life is but has not yet come to terms with it.

Gottfredson's Mickey is a pre-school kid of five to eight years: He is still
young enough to have a child's raw energy and a child's interest in everything. But he is
already old enough to get glimpses of live beyond this age of innocence. He get's in contact
with hardships, with cruelty and even death. This is why in my opinion Mickey in his best
(early) Gottfredson days is an even more interesting character than Donald: because he is
a child acting as an adult. Like a child he throws himself head over heels into action,
acts intuitively and is very open-minded. And he acts like an adult: He takes responsibility,
helps people, and makes his own decisions. And this also means that, as David wrote, he gets
in contact the dark sides of life: He sees that there is failure, cruelty and death. In the
early strips Mickey tries to commit suicide (sic!) - this plot had been suggested by Disney
himself. But in spite of all this Mickey remains an innocent child. He shows us how our life
and the world could be if we would be able to preserve our own childhood. Instead what happens
to us is what also happened to Mickey: We grow up, we settle down, we get quieter, we loose
our dreams. Maybe the best example of this fascination Mickey has are the elaborate death traps
the Phantom Blot builds: They are deadly serious, yes, but they are also a (hild's)game, and
a very imaginative game at that. In later years in contrast we often have a Pet Leg Pete who
simply uses a pistol - which he never fires because children could be disturbed.

To put it in a nutshell: Barks' Donald is the teenager I was and Gottfredson's Mickey is the
adult I would like to be.

Cord






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