Goofy's Raven friend

[DAVID.A.GERSTEIN]

      Dear Folks,

      I'll be doggoned!  Never even occurred to me, while we were 
discussing the less-well-known Disney characters, to bring up 
Ellsworth!

      That's right.  Ellsworth the raven was created by Bill Walsh in 
1950 for the Mickey Mouse Sunday strip.  And he appeared on and off 
there for some years.  He was originally a pet of Goofy, but could 
talk perfectly sensibly (which surprised Mickey no end, on their 
first meeting).  Somehow seems to me that in a Disney comic, no one 
should be surprised at a talking bird when that bird walks on his 
hind legs, has hands (if not gloves) and wears a baseball cap and 
turtleneck shirt!  Just one of those blurry boundaries in 
anthropomorphic logic, I guess.
      Only one or two of the Ellsworth Sunday pages were ever 
reprinted by Dell.  It seems that they made a conscious decision NOT 
to use the character, for whatever reason.  I'm guessing that there 
was a similar decision about Eega Beeva, although of course I have no 
way of proving that.  But I have seen many Ellsworth Sunday pages 
in the French comics -- and the French have gone on to do many 
original gags with the character (whose name is "Genius" in French -- 
he's very smart as well as a smart aleck).
      The first appearance of Ellsworth appears in the Abbeville 
Press GOOFY book (which is a reworking of Mondadori material).  It is 
not noted as any specific landmark there, though;  it's just an 
isolated Sunday page, one of several in the first few pages of the 
volume.
      Romano Scarpa has used the character several times, for example 
in an early-1980s tale called "The African Queen" (really).  In that 
story, no pet-master relationship is implied as Ellsworth just joins 
in with Mickey and Goofy on their adventure.  The only difference 
between Ellsworth and other "human-animals" is that he can FLY, even 
at this late date.
      I like Ellsworth and may use him in upcoming stories, now that 
I see that people know him somewhere besides France.  On the other 
hand, his mixture of brains and smart-aleckiness make him not so 
different from my conception of Mickey, and the whole nature of the 
character in relation to the others (pet vs. friend) makes him 
troubling.  So we'll see.  In the strips of the 1950s, Mickey is just 
the boring observer of Ellsworth's witty doings.  Yawn.

      Other business:  Yep, I know that Walt Disney's hand appears in 
that Strobl DD biography.  Gladstone colored the hand WHITE in their 
recent reprint of that story.  Groan.  Or are we meant to believe 
that Walt is, like so many of his characters, wearing gloves?  He 
doesn't have those stripes on the back of his hand...

      I don't care what the Dutch think, I like Don Rosa's art a LOT 
and, in fact, the art is why he's the FAVORITE Duck artist of my 
brother and best friend back home.  So there.

      DAVE RAWSON:  You want to get more specific, eh?  Well, then, 
how, and to what extent, have you been using some of the more 
Gottfredson-like situations, and vintage characters, in the MM 
stories that you're doing for Egmont just now?

      As for Vicar's "studio", he doesn't have a tremendously big 
place, otherwise he'd churn it out like Jaime Diaz.  He pencils his 
stories himself, then divides the inking between various folks (and 
he does ink some of them on his own, too).  I think that the inkers 
do a remarkable job, because aside from the fact that some use 
pie-cuts in the eyes and some not, I couldn't tell the difference.

       I'll have more news for you on my trip very shortly, Harry!

      And I'll be back tomorrow.  Best,
      David Gerstein <9475609 at arran.sms.edu>
      "A bird just likes to know where he stands, after all!"