Duckburg and Mouseton -- Gottfredson & comic strip-writing

[Olivier]

Hi!


>>>> Sigvald Grøsfjeld jr. wrote:
>>>> Anyway, if you are right, Paul Murry may no longer deserve to be counted
>>>> together with the greatest artists like Gottfredson [...] who normally do all the work
themselves.

Stefan replied:
>>> Gottfredson usually didn't write his own stories either...


Not exactly.
Gottfredson did write the early strips he worked on.
Webb Smith helped on "Blaggard Castle" (1932-3).
Gottfredson plotted the stories, Osborne / de Maris scripted them with him, then he edited & drew
them.
Bill Walsh eventually did all the writing, but even then Gottfredson's editing was crucial.

Gottfredson *was* a great artist / author. The writers were here to help, but it's his plotting &
editing that made the Mickey strips-- a rather coherent whole, even, despite the evolution: just
like you can identify a Barks story despite the various graphic styles & kinds of stories, all these
Mickey stories are clearly Gottfredson stories.

All this is told in the excerpt below from Disney Archivist David R. Smith's 1975 interview with
Floyd Gottfredson, reprinted in "Mickey Mouse in Color-- 1930s Disney Comic Strip Classics" (pp
103-5)...
[I broke Gottfredson's answers into paragraphs]


All the best,

Olivier


* * * * * * * * * *


Disney assigned Ted Osborne to the Mickey strips to help Gottfredson in 1933 ("Pluto and the
Dogcatcher").

(DS)
How did the Comic Strip Department evolve? And did you head it because you were the only one there
to start with?

(FG)
Yes, and this is how it grew. It was a one-man department at first and then, as the need arose
through the years, I just added men. I meant to tell you about Osborne and de Maris. Ted Osborne and
Dick Creedon were writers on a comedy-variety radio show that ran on KHJ-- and I believe it was a
daily thing, so it was a lot of  work to write and produce. Wlat brough the two fellows out from
this radio show to develop a Mickey Mouse radio show. They produced some shows, but it didn'tl last
very long. When the radio show failed, Walt had to find something else for Ted and Dick to do. So,
he gave me Ted Osborne to write the comic strip material, and Dick Creedon went into Publicity.
Publicity had be then developed into a three- or four-man art department under Tom Wood, and they
had one publicity writer.
Ted Osborne was my first regular writer. I had written everything up to that point. This was now in
1933, I think. So, from that time on, Ted and I worked together.I plotted the continuities because I
was used to them. For some strange reason all of the writers I ever had through the years p to Bill
Walsh were clever writers, but they couldn't plot. These fellows were good at dialog, and especially
good at puns, and puns were used quite extensively in comic strips then, and they were good enough
at it that they"ve been mentioned several times in teh anthologies about comics, but for some reason
they just had no aptitude for plotting continuities.
So, I continued plotting the things, and the way we would work-- I would work up the general plot,
the story line, for the continuities, and then we would sit down and talk out what we planned to do
for the coming week. We'd pretty work out all the business, and generally the dialog, and then the
writer would take this and break it down into strips and write it up on the typewriter. I'd go over
that and edit it, and then I'd draw the things.
So Merrill de Maris at that time was in the Story Department, so he traded them. [Walt] took Osborne
up to story and sent de Maris won to me. After three of four months, something like that, he became
unhappy with Osborne in Story, and was now becoming impressed with what de Maris was doing on the
comic strips, so he traded again. I was never consulted on these things. Walt would just call and
inform me that he was making the switch.

(DS)
Perhaps these guys were both good at comic strip but neither of  them was good at animation story.

(FG)
Yes, well, it was not only that, but I guess the bull sessions that we were having, and the fact
that i was diredcting the general line of  the continuities was the thing that made them hang
together. Comic strip historians have asked me why with the three or four writers i had over the
years, the general flavor and spirit of  the continuities remained the same, and why the
personalities of  the writers weren't reflected in the stories that they write. I guess the answer
is that I plotted all of  them through the years, and I edited everything, and we had bull sessions
and talkjed over the business.
Well, this was what was happening to Osborne and de Maris. Working as we did down thee, they were
turning out good work. But Walt thought that they were doing everything-- the plotting, the editing,
and everything else. Finally, in late '37 or early '38, Walt made the last change and sent de Maris
back to me and took Osborne back into Story.
[...]
De Maris was a very talented writer, but Osborne was sort of  meachanical. e had a tremendous gag
file, but he did everything by formula. So, i had to make a decision, and decided to keep de Maris.
Osborne left the Studio then, and de Maris stayed with me until '42.
[...]
It developed that Bill [Wlash] was part owner of  the Margaret Ettinger Advertising Agency in
Hollywood, and h'd been working as a gag writer and public relations man for Burns and Allen, and
also for Bergen and McCarthy. He was also a friend of  Vern Caldwell's, and Vern had been trying to
get him out here for quite a while as a publicity writer, but Bill was so big that the Studio
couldn't afford to pay him what he had to have in order to join the staff. So Vern had talked to
Hal, and said, "If  Floyd could use him on the comic strips, then between the two jobs we could
afford him". So, I told Vern that I would like to give him a try, and Bill joined the staff. I
worked wiht Bill for the first two or three months quite closely. I had to practically rewrite
everything that he did at first because he was so production-minded that it would have taken four
strips to draw what he wrote for one strip. It was this sort of  a thing with him. But all the
talent ad ability were there; it was just a matter of  working him into the process of  learning the
limitations of  writing for comic strps. Of  course, he eventually learned this very quickly. He was
such a talented guy.
[...]
Then, he took over the writing and the plotting on his own, and all I did was edit as he'd bring
these things in. We just couldn't get him to pare the dialog and the business in the strips down to
the comic strip's limitations, so I said, "Look-- write everything you want into them. We would much
rather have more things than we can use than not enough. You give them to me and I'll pare thel down
to the comic strip format, so that they'll work in there". So, this is the way we worked together.
Gonzy-- [Manuel] Gonzales-- especially would get so exasperated. I wouldn't attempt to cut out the
description and the business with the props so much as I would the dialog when I edited them. Then I
would draw in just what I felt was the best of  the props and the business that he suggested, and
leave the rest out. But Gonzy had a problem with this because he wanted to draw everything in, and
he couldn't. There was too much work, and he beefed about Bill writing so much stuff  into it all
the time to apoint where we began to refer to Bill as "Cecil B. de Walsh".