Fantagraphics: At It Again!

Hello, 2024!

I'm sure many of you remember my expose of Fantagraphic's many crimes against its consumers, and the badness continues on.

For Christmas I received the first volume of Mickey Mouse: The Floyd Gottfredson Library. I'm really happy to finally read from another legend in animal funnies, as well as read more adventures starring my hero, Mickey Mouse. But at the same time Fantagraphics's awful handling of this lessens the enjoyment, just as they have screwed royally everything else they reprint.

Well, before I get to the complaints, I'll at least say that the actual work within the book is good. Gottfredson was a great teller-of-tales; probably not as much as Carl Barks, but way better than J.J. Abrams, that's for sure. Mickey quips too much, more like Spider-Man does, but at this point he was not the personality we all (or at least me) loves today. He also indulges like his species:

A note: the writer and artist of the few few weeks are listed in the book as Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. I don't know how true this is. I never knew of either being involved in anything but their film work. This may be a publicity cover for the other artists that has somehow survived all these years. But something was different: the first few weeks were not only unfunny but really unfunny. If Disney was a great gagman, why were these so bad? He always seemed funny to me.

Anyway, while researching for this very blogpost, I saw that Fantagraphics has not finished this series yet, and it started in 2011. The latest Volume was 12, and that was in 2018. They stopped at late 1955, and they have exactly 20 years to go.

Also, as usual, there are apologies behind every corner. It would be understandable if they addressed any racism in the stories, but instead they crybaby over the silliest things, including gun usage and "soyboy" shaming. Anybody Left or Right or in the middle (myself) understands that these were written near-a-hundred years ago, so no need to let us know why we should be offended! (I don't know how much of this was editor David Gerstein's doing as much as Disney and Fantagraphics's identical policies.) 

And to top it off, essays and introductions abound with economical thesis navel-gazing.

Most all of this is unnecessary because, despite this being a collection of strips most-likely aimed at children, the majority of the buyers are adults. All that need be is a "This is intended for the adult collector..." disclaimer and be done with it! 

The irony is that the best words written in this volume is that of the living legend Floyd Norman, a man of color.

Floyd with Joe Grant.

But that's not all, folks. This volume has no Sundays, and is really thin. There is at least 202 pages of comic strips, with three years worth represented. I compared it to my most recent Pogo acquisition, Vol. 2. That has, including the Sundays, 314 pages of comics. That makes a literal 112 difference. And Pogo is only two years! This is even more scary when one considers that Gottfredson drew this thing for close to fifty years, while Kelly about thirty! There might be a reasonable explanation, if I look hard enough, but I smell something else...

But then again, there was a monster amount of special features, enough to fit two more years in, and a few were totally redundant, like a narrative of Mickey's creation, something 99.99999999% of readers know already. Also there are publicity posters and foreign covers, which is cool, but at the same time you wonder if these are available is different books on Mickey Mouse and then question, if they aren't, why not.

My guess is they are shortening the strip page numbers to make more volumes, and not only that...they are extending the number of volumes. And you know what that means.