Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: Color Sundays Vol. 1 "Call Of The Wild"
The burgeoning popularity of Mickey Mouse on the screen and in the daily newspaper comics made the 1932 addition of a full-color Sunday strip inevitable. The first surprise in this collection of the initial four years of Sunday installments is that in this early color incarnation, Mickey’s face was pink rather than white! But, more significantly, each Sunday strip comprised about a dozen panels, not the measly four panels of the dailies, permitting a different pace: gags could be extended longer, and story lines unwound at their leisure. Unlike the dailies, which featured stories that went on for weeks, the Sundays mixed serialized adventures—in this volume, Mickey visits the Wild West, fights a giant in a fairy tale he tells his nephews, and scales a mountain to win a $1,000 prize—with single-episode gag strips, all drawn in a charmingly old-fashioned style. The high-spirited, adventure-seeking mouse in these vintage strips—a far cry from today’s bland, domesticated version—makes it clear why Mickey captivated Depression-era America. --Gordon Flagg