Sunday, January 21, 2024

Book Review: Walt Disney's Mickey and Donald - Mickey's Craziest Adventures


When Peg Leg Pete and the Beagle Boys shrink and steal Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin, Mickey and Donald must track them down… across lost cities, ancient lands, under the sea, in the air, and…into space?!? In a hilarious satire that will entertain all ages, Mickey’s Craziest Adventures introduces its epic tale as if it were a rare 1965 Disney classic, deemed too wild for publication and saved only in fragments — but in fact, modern comics masters Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas have created an exciting all-new album-length stand-alone Disney thriller, drawn in a kinetic indie-comics style and presented like a classic vintage work, hiding the fact that it's actually shamelessly spoofing Silver Age comics clichés!

Walt Disney's Mickey and Donald: Mickey's Craziest Adventures will be published February 27, 2024. Fantagraphics Books provided an early galley for review.

One of my earliest comic book memories was reading the colorful adventures of many Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. So, a book like this is like taking a nostalgic trip back to my childhood.

This is supposed to simulate classic story which ran as a one-page-per-month serial in the 60's. Trondheim and Keramidas made it as if they had "recreated it" from the pages they "found in comic bins". Some of the pages are "torn" while others have various discoloration or stains. The presentation gives it a true feeling of old comics.

The story has some holes indeed (there are only 44 pages here of a much larger tale 80 plus page tale), but that aspect simulates comic collecting back when I was a kid in the 70's. You found back issues wherever you could. You consumed parts of stories and even read issues out of order. It was a treasure hunt. And that is what this story is too in a way. The mechanic of "missing chapters" might throw off some readers. Even with "holes", the reader can easily piece together this grand adventure.

Overall, it was fun and captured an older comic vibe with some satiric elements to boot.

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