Dell Comics

About Dell Comics

It seemed a shame, of course, not to reprint these strips in the growing comic book industry, so in 1935 Disney associates Kay Kamen and Hal Horne began to publish MICKEY MOUSE MAGAZINE; when Horne dropped out of the deal, Kamen farmed out production of the magazine to Western Publishing. Besides comics, the magazine featured stories, games, and poster-style full-page illustrations.

In 1939, Western began publishing a series of one-shot comic books entitled FOUR COLOR, containing a wide variety of newspaper strip material. When in early 1940 an all-Donald Duck number in this series was a big success, Kamen and Western editor Eleanor Packer took the hint and transformed MICKEY MOUSE MAGAZINE into a full-fledged comic book, WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES.

But a good thing - the newspaper strips that began the move to comics - was about to come to an end. With both FOUR COLOR and WDC&S reprinting them, the supply was running low. So original stories began to be produced especially for comic books. The first to be created were "Pluto Saves the Ship" (1941) and "Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold," (1942), both for one-shot titles; WDC&S took the plunge to new material as well with an untitled Jose Carioca story in WDC&S 27. The first two stories marked the debut of now-famous "Duck Man" Carl Barks, while the Carioca adventure was the first Disney tale drawn by Carl Buettner, who would go on to create Li'l Bad Wolf and adapt other SILLY SYMPHONY characters to comics.

The success of Carl Barks need not be documented here; suffice it to say that by the late 1940s, original material made up the vast majority of the Disney comics being published, and by this time Mickey, Donald, and others had regularly appearing slots within FOUR COLOR (which became the characters' own individually-numbered titles a few years later). Among the characters who found success at this time were Li'l Bad Wolf (first appearing in WDC&S 52), Br'er Rabbit (FC 127), Chip 'n' Dale (WDC&S 69), and Hiawatha (WDC&S 30), but the biggest "find" of the era was Uncle Scrooge McDuck, whom Barks created in 1947 and who received his own very popular title beginning in 1952. Barks' Gyro Gearloose and Taliaferro's Grandma Duck also received a lot of exposure from Dell, although their solo titles were never issued regularly.

In the late 1940s, Western also made the decision not to continue adapting Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse for publication in WDC&S. After tossing Mickey around between a good handful of undistinguished artists for a full six years, Western finally settled on Paul Murry; unfortunately, the six-year inconsistency had heavily damaged Mickey's popularity. This is why up to the present day, Disney Duck comics tend to outsell Mouse equivalents.