While Mickey Mouse became a domesticated creature in cartoons (above), Floyd Gottfredson kept the mouse’s daredevil spirit alive in the daily comic strip he drew and sometime wrote. © Disney Enterprises. All rights reserved.

Mickey Mouse was the most popular cartoon character in the 1930s and an international celebrity. Unfortunately, the Disney Studio bowed to objections that the feisty Mickey was not a good role model for children and this clever little hero with a daredevil spirit became more and more domesticated in his animated cartoons. However, the true spirit of Mickey was maintained for many more years in the daily comic strip drawn and sometimes written by the legendary Floyd Gottfredson.

In the fall of 1979, I had the opportunity to talk with Floyd about the connections between the Mickey of the screen and the Mickey of the newspapers. While many hands worked on the animated cartoons, Floyd was the primary influence on the comic strip for over four decades and had retired four years earlier from this amazing accomplishment.

Jim Korkis: Could you share a little about your cartooning training before you took over the Mickey Mouse comic strip?

Floyd Gottfredson: I was raised in a small town, Sigurd, Utah, about 180 miles south of Salt Lake City. When I was 13 I started studying cartooning by correspondence with the C.N. Landon School of Cartooning and Illustrating of Cleveland, Ohio. In 1926, when I was 21, I started taking another correspondence course in cartooning. This time it was with the Federal Schools of Minneapolis, now known as the Art Instruction Schools, Inc. Since the nearest art schools were in Salt Lake City, correspondence courses were the most practical way for me to go.

JK: Did you have any early training in animation?

FG: No. There were no schools or books about animation at that time to the best of my knowledge and I was really just interested in newspaper cartooning. In Dec. 1928, armed with the samples I had done for various magazines, I brought my family to Los Angeles, hoping to crash one of the seven major newspapers but they didn’t want me. I talked with a fellow who told me he had heard that Walt was going to New York the following week to look for artists. I lost no time in putting together my samples and rushing out to the Disney Studios which was then located on Hyperion Avenue.

JK: Did you get to meet Walt?

FG: Walt himself looked over my samples and asked me what sort of work I was interested in doing and I told him I wanted to do comic strips. Well, at that time, Disney wasn’t doing any comic strips. Walt was quite a salesman. He told me I didn’t want to get involved in doing comic strips because it was a rat race. He said that the future would be animation and he was so convincing that I said, “Fine. Do you have any openings in animation?” And he said, “Sure, we’ll put you in as an in-betweener.” Then he said that he and Ub Iwerks were just beginning to put together a Mickey Mouse comic strip for King Features and that it would be good to have me around as a back-up man in case they needed some help.

JK: Did you start working at Disney immediately?

FG: I went to work the following day, Dec. 19, 1929. I was 24 years old and had been married for five years. I had been earning $65 a week as a projectionist and Walt was offering $18 a week but I took it because he had really convinced me that animation was the future.

JK: What did you do as an in-betweener?

FG: I only worked about four months in animation as an inbetweener. I did inbetween work for Johnny Cannon and later Dave Hand and Wilfred Jackson. I even did a few inbetweens for Ub Iwerks. It was all work for the Silly Symphonies. Norm Ferguson and Dave Hand gave me a little piece of animation to do on Cannibal Capers. It was a lion running out of the jungle and a cannibal beating on a drum. That was really the only animation I ever did but it worked out pretty well and I was just fascinated with animation.

Gottfredson Meets Mickey Mouse
JK: How did you finally end up with the Mickey Mouse comic strip?

FG: The Mickey Mouse comic strip debuted in Jan. 13, 1930 with Walt doing the writing and Ub penciled them and an artist named Win Smith was doing the inking. After the first 18 strips, Ub left and Win took over the penciling and the inking. The strip was straight gags adapted from the Mickey Mouse movie cartoons. King Features wanted continuity, that is to say, they wanted the strip to have a story and a plot because other strips like Sidney Smith’s The Gumps were very popular being “story strips.” Walt tried to convince Win to take over the writing and Win kept stalling but I don’t know why. Finally, Walt met with him and told him he was going to take over the writing and Win who had a short fuse wasn’t going to be told what to do and so he quit. He came by my desk and said, “I think you’ve got a new job.”

JK: So it was as simple as that?

FG: About a half hour later, Walt called me into his office and asked me whether I would like to take over doing the strip. By now I had become very interested in animation and was reluctant to change. I told Walt that he was right and that I would prefer to stay with animation. Well, Walt was quite a salesman. He told me to just take the strip for two weeks to give him some time to find another artist. I wanted to help out so I agreed. After all, he had told me that part of my job was to be a possible backup on the strip. At the end of a month, I wondered if he was really seriously looking for anyone. After two months, I began to worry that he might actually find someone because I was enjoying doing it and wanted to continue with it. Nothing more was ever said about it and I continued to draw the Mickey daily strip for about 45 years until my retirement on Oct. 1, 1975.

JK: When did your first strip appear?

FG: My first strip appeared May 5, 1930, and the strip had gone into continuities April 1, 1930. Walt had written a story about Mickey finding a treasure map to a gold mine in Death Valley. To help me get started, Walt continued to write about two weeks worth of strips for me to draw and then I took over the writing on the May 19 in the middle of the story and continued to write the daily until 1932 when five different writers took over writing the continuities.