Mesa Trubil

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Tue Nov 13 14:50:26 CET 2001


A friend sent me a link to a site run by the family of Dick Huemer who was
a Disney animator in the old days. In the late 40's he was laid off and
started writing a western comedy-adventure strip with Paul Murry as the
artist. Was everyone aware of this except me? It seems to have actually
appeared in a few papers in the year I was born, but apparently soon
disappeared when Huemer was rehired by the studio.
This strip looks amazing to me. The site claims it looks like "Lil' Abner",
and it might, but to my eyes it looks more like a precursor to the work of
Goscinny & Uderzo ("Ompa-Pa", "Asterix", etc.) and so many other European
comics that bloomed in the late 50's - early 60's. This sort of
"human-based" comedy-adventure comic ceased to exist in America after the
early days of "Abner", "Alley Oop" and the like, and became the exclusive
"property" of European cartoonists from the 50's onward to this day. I wish
I had grown up with those sorts of comics rather than "funny animal" comics
which American comics soon decided all humor stories had to involve. I've
always liked Murry's Mouse (since it was the one I grew up on), but these
strips are much better! And the humor does not avoid death jokes and racial
matters like a Disney comic is forced to do.  (I mean, Disney would never
allow dick humor, eh?) This is probably what Murry really wanted to be
doing (newspaper strips where the $ was) just as Barks always wished he
could have been doing.
I wonder what a world would be like where I grew up reading Carl Barks and
Paul Murry comics where the plots and art involved "real" people (like
"Asterix") rather than cartoon animals belonging to a corporate giant. I
wish it had been that way. Understand, I mean we would have gotten the same
great Barks stories, we would have learned to love a different cast of
characters exactly as we love Barks' version of Donald and $crooge and so
forth, but it would all have been work done for themselves with no
limitations forced by a licensing corporation. But then... their creations
might not have caught on without the added boost of public interest given
to their work by the "Disney" name, and I might never have heard of them.
Hm.
Anyway, take a look at the site:
http://www.huemer.com/cowboys2.htm
...and sorry if everyone was already fully aware of this work.
(It took me a minute to catch on to the name of the town of "Mesa Trubil",
so Europeans might have even more difficulty. I was pronouncing it as I
think it's written... "may-sa troo-bil"... but apparently the author thinks
it should be pronounced "mess a' trouble". Get it?)




More information about the DCML mailing list