Floyd Gottfredson

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Arthur Floyd Gottfredson (born May 5, 1905 in Kaysville , Utah , USA , † July 22, 1986 in Montrose , California ) was an American cartoonist , draftsman and comic book writer and painter . He is best known for the Mickey Mouse comics that appeared in American newspapers , which he drew and sometimes wrote from 1930 to 1975.

childhood

Floyd Gottfredson was born in a small train station in Kaysville, Utah, the stationmaster of which was his grandfather, and grew up in Siggurd , Utah (290 km south of Salt Lake City ). His great-grandfather immigrated from Denmark in the 1840s. His family was Mormon ; Gottfredson had three brothers and four sisters.

At the age of eleven, he shot himself in the right arm in a hunting accident with a rifle, which was seriously injured. Nine operations were necessary to restore the arm to some extent. Nevertheless, he could only move his right hand very restrictedly for the rest of his life. In his later life as a draftsman, he compensated for this by moving his entire arm while drawing.

In order to recover from the consequences of the accident, the eleven-year-old had to stay indoors and could no longer play outside. He was interested in art, encouraged by his mother. His father was against his son's artistic activities and would have preferred if he had worked like other boys, which was impossible due to his handicap. With no art schools in the area, Floyd took a correspondence course in drawing from the Cleveland CN Landon School of Cartooning and Illustrating . He earned the money for the course by selling a book about his grandfather's experiences in the Indian War from door to door. During this time he also discovered the books Horatio Algers , other adventure books for boys and detective novels.

Cartoonist

In 1924 he married Mattie Mason and moved to Richfield , Utah, where he worked as a projectionist and draftsman for a small chain of movie theaters . This is where his son Norman and daughter Colleen were born. In 1926 he subscribed to another correspondence drawing course, this time from the Federal Schools of Illustrating and Cartooning in Minneapolis . Through school he got orders for cartoons, among others. a. for the Salt Lake City Telegram newspaper and for various magazines. In 1928, at the suggestion of the school, he entered a national cartoon competition run by the American Tree Association and finished second. Encouraged by this, Gottfredson and his family moved to Southern California in December 1928 to find work at a newspaper. He was unsuccessful and worked again as a projectionist.

Disney

When the cinema where he had worked was demolished in 1929, he looked for work again. He had heard that Walt Disney was looking for cartoonists and applied to Walt Disney Productions . On December 19, 1929, he was hired for $ 18 a week as an auxiliary and intermediate phase draftsman for cartoons ( Inbetweener ). He originally wanted to work on the then brand new Mickey Mouse comic strip, but Disney advised him against because the job was badly paid and had no future. The strip was written by Walt Disney himself and drawn in the first few weeks by Ub Iwerks and from February 10, 1930 by Win Smith . When Disney also wanted to entrust the writing of the strip to Win Smith, the two fell out, and Smith left the Disney studio. Disney then asked Gottfredson if he could take over the comic strip for two weeks until he found someone else.

The two weeks finally turned 45½ years: Gottfredson worked from May 5, 1930 to October 1, 1975, the day of his retirement, for the Mickey Mouse comic strip (from May 17, 1930 solely responsible for the manuscript). The (pencil) drawings were always by him during this time. The basic structure of the plot always came from him; the actual dialogues came from other copywriters for many years. a. Ted Osborne , Merrill de Maris and Bill Walsh . The ink, i.e. tracing or drawing the final pencil drawings with black ink in order to obtain a print-ready drawing, was sometimes done by other draftsmen, among others. a. Al Taliaferro .

The Mickey Mouse strip changed under Gottfried's aegis. The barely coherent gags based on the Mickey cartoons that it initially consisted of were soon replaced by true sequel stories that mirrored Gottfried's reading in his youth and quickly became very popular. In 1931 readers were invited to write to Mickey if they wanted a "photo" like the one taken of Mickey on the current strip, and mountains of letters were delivered to the Disney studio. Gottfredson shaped the appearance of the characters known from the movies in the comics and added The Phantom Blot ( The Black Phantom ), Chief O'Hara ( Commissioner Hunter ), Detective Casey ( Inspector Issel ), Eega Beeva ( Gamma ), Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse ( Mack and Muck ), Butch ( Dicker ), Captain Churchmouse ( Käpt'n Kirchmaus ), Professors Ecks, Douplex and Triplex ( Professors Ecks, Duplex and Triplex ), Captain Doberman ( Käpt'n Dobermann ), Gloomy The Mechanic ( Schorschel Schräuble ), Eli Squinch ( Kurt Kropp ), Doctor Vulter ( Käpt'n Orang ), Doctor Einmug ( Professor Wunderlich ), Joe Piper ( Rudi Rohrbruch ) and Professor Dustibones ( Professor Trockenstaub ).

In the 1930s in particular, the artist achieved outstanding adventure stories such as Blaggard Castle (1932), The Mail Pilot (1933), The Crazy Crime Wave (1933), Editor-in-grief (1935), The Pirate Submarine (1935), Mickey Mouse joins the Foreign Legion (1936), The Seven Ghosts (1936), Island in the Sky (1936), Mickey Mouse in Search of Jungle Treasure (1937), The Monarch of Medioka (1937), The Plumber's Helper (1938) and Mickey Mouse outwits the Phantom Blot (1939), which in the following period had a strong influence not only on Disney comics, but also on the genre in general. On October 5, 1955, the sequel stories were replaced by individual gag strips at the request of the King Features Syndicate , which distributed the strip to the newspapers. Gottfredson continued to draw the strips, but could no longer use his storytelling talent.

From 1932 onwards, a Mickey Mouse comic strip was also published on Sundays, which was independent of the weekday strips and differed from them in being threefold in size and in color. Gottfredson also drew the Sunday strip, in the same way and with the same staff as the weekday strip, until Manuel Gonzales took it over in 1938 . Gottfredson wrote the text until 1946 and later occasionally helped out with drawings. His last Mickey Mouse comic strip, a Sunday strip, appeared on September 19, 1976. His last weekday trip was on November 15, 1975.

In addition to the Mickey Mouse strips, Gottfredson occasionally worked on other Disney newspaper strips, including a. 1960 and 1963 to 1965 on Christmas strips with Peter Pan , the three little pigs , Cinderella and Bambi .

The last few years

During his time at Disney, Gottfredson remained anonymous, and he signed his comic strips with Walt Disney - a fate that he shared with other Disney cartoonists such as Carl Barks . It wasn't until 1975, towards the end of his tenure at Disney, that his name slowly became known, among others. a. by the Swedish Disney fan Horst Schröder. Gottfredson devoted himself to other art styles, but remained true to the figure, and so after his retirement he created some watercolors that show scenes from his well-known Mickey sequel stories. In 1988, after his death on July 22, 1986, the definitive Gottfredson book, the splendid volume Mickey Mouse in Color , a colored reprint of several of his best strips in a luxurious presentation and limited edition, for which he had signed parchment pages, finally appeared were later involved in the band. 2003 Gottfredson was finally posthumously to Disney Legend ( Disney Legend appointed).

literature

  • Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson . Vol. 1: Race to Death Valley . Fantagraphics Books, Seattle 2011, ISBN 978-1-60699-441-2
    First volume of the Floyd Gottfredson Library, which reprints all daily trips from 1930 to 1975.
  • Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse in Color . Another Rainbow Publishing, Prescott, Arizona 1988
    Magnificent limited edition (3100 edition), which, in addition to interviews and articles, contains many of the best Gottfredson strips and also a Mickey story by Carl Barks.
  • Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse in Color . Pantheon Books, New York, NY 1988, ISBN 0-394-57519-9
    "Popular edition" of the luxury volume in a smaller format and without some extras like the Barks story.
  • Klaus Strzyz and Andreas C. Knigge : Disney from the inside. Talks about the empire of the mouse . (With a foreword by Carl Barks). Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-548-36551-5
  • Stefan Schmidt (Ed.): Homage to Floyd Gottfredson . 1993 (Sonderheft des Der Donaldist, 27)
    Special edition of the Donaldist magazine Der Donaldist , with interview, articles, commented Gottfredson index and many images.
  • Mickey's classic . 8 volumes. Ehapa, Stuttgart 1985 to 1989. Contains Gottfried's Mickey Mouse workday strips from 1930 to August 8, 1936.
  • The Complete Daily Strip Adventures of Mickey Mouse 1930–1955. 26 volumes. Edited by Horst Schröder. o. O., Comic Book Club Germany o. J .; Leipzig, Verein Kultur der Völker o. J. Licensed edition, 500 copies.
  • Horst Schröder: Goofy - the secret of an unstoppable ascent. In: Horst Schröder (Ed.): Walt Disney: Ich, Goofy. The stories. Edited, translated and provided with a foreword. Melzer Verlag, 1975, pp. 5-10.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Horst Schröder: Goofy - the secret of an unstoppable ascent. 1975, p. 6.
personal data
SURNAME Gottfredson, Floyd
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gottfredson, Arthur Floyd (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American comic book artist and writer, cartoonist and painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaysville , Utah
DATE OF DEATH July 22, 1986
Place of death La Crescenta-Montrose , California