Mickey Mouse and the Seven Ghosts, 1936

I recently acquired a collection of old newspaper comic strip clippings. I enjoyed the drawings in this storyline about a group of ghosts confronted by Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck from November 1936.

I know Mickey and the gang have their devotees, but I don’t have that strong feeling, generally speaking. Mickey and his pals have never resonated with me as they do with people I know. As someone with decades of experience in the cartooning world once told me, “Mickey has no personality.” And since then, I think that’s been my general thinking. I wouldn’t say their statement is 100% accurate, but it does express a vague feeling I’d had. Mickey feels like a character developed to be a mascot for a product, not an individual character.

But, that could be due to the fact there were no new Mickey Mouse stories in my childhood. I was raised during the original Duck Tales, and Rescue Rangers era in the 1980s, Mickey not appearing much in those shows at all, let alone as the main character. And, Mickey had been missing from the funny papers for a long time by then, too. Which, I now realize, is too bad.

Though sometimes signed “Walt Disney,” it was an artist named Floyd Gottfredson, who was leading the team working on the Mickey Mouse comic strip in 1936.

From this storyline, I have the ending, which includes most of the month of November 1936. The storyline begins in August, but I don’t have those. These were clipped from an unknown paper perhaps from Washington…