Production in the United Kingdom (Fleetway, Egmont)

General information

The first British Disney comic stories were a series of stories, none longer than four pages, with Mickey, Minnie, Horace, Clarabelle, Dippy, and Butch, done through the 1930s for Dean's MICKEY MOUSE ANNUAL series. Most were drawn by Wilfred Haughton. The original Donald stories, including "Donald and Donna" and "Donald and Mac," were drawn by William A. Ward from 1937-1941, both adventure series with Eli Squinch as a continuing villain. There was also a series pairing Goofy and Toby Tortoise as detectives. The British also did long-running series of gag strips with Clarabelle Cow, Goofy, and Eega Beeva. In the 1950s, the British produced a few long Mickey adventures of their own, including "The Land of Pantomimes" (with Mickey and Eega).

Horst Schröder wrote the following:

British "Micky Mouse Weekly" (MMW) started at February 8th, 1936 and together with Italian "Topolino" (1932) and French "Le Journal de Mickey" (1934) is one of the oldest Disney comics in Europe. Contents of those oversized books of 8 to 16 pages were not only Disney material. Main attraction of MMW was the back cover containing Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse strips in beautifully coloured photographical prints. In the inside there were reprints of "Silly Symphonies" (Sunday pages based on the Disney films) and individual gag pages. Additionally to this original US-material there were British-licensed strips and a series of articles with Disney characters, but also a lot of not-Disney-related material.

Most remarkable were the covers drawn by Brit Wilfred Haughton until shortly before WW II. Six of his most beautiful covers are reprinted in "Ich Goofy" (and another five in the second book). Without doubt there are better crafted covers but they have a certain charm that should appeal to every comic fan. In contrast to his later covers Haughton didn't concentrate on a few or just one character in those early covers but assembled everybody from the Disney universe of that time. He didn't only use "film situations" but used the characters in typically British surroundings, too. His style was heavily influenced by the early cartoons, even in later times when the Disney characters already got "more elegant". Often he did covers as "mini-comics" with text bubbles and simple gags, often based on sit-com. Both the relation to the early cartoons and the simple sitcom especially showed in the character of Goofy who was still the dumb "Dippy" from the beginning years.

There's not too much known about Wilfred Haughton. Before his work for MMW he illustrated the British Disney Yearbooks (published since 1930) which contained re-tellings of the cartoons and original stories. In the early 1930s Haughton did a humoristic strip about two "negro children" called "Ebb and Flo" in "The Daily Herald". He was also known as inventor of toys and producer of puppet trickfilms. He also was the artist of several stories with Goofy and Toby Tortoise (the tortoise from "The Tortoise and the Hare" (1935) and "Toby Tortoise Returns" (1936)) being detectives. Toby appeared on a lot of covers of MMW. In 1939 Haughton had to give up drawing the covers because he insisted to draw the characters still in the style of the 1930s. His successor as cover artist was at first Victor Ibbitson, later Charles Richardson and his brother Ernest. Some of the covers after the war have been drawn by Basil Reynolds.

There have been 4 long continuing Goofy & Toby detective stories which Wilfred Haughton drew in 1936. Also Basil Reynolds did a Goofy-feature for a long time in which he did this "verbal nonsense" the British like so much.

(See also the page on Swedish production)

Story codes

As far as we know, UK stories didn't carry any story codes.

Story codes in the INDUCKS

UK stories get a code starting with U. Covers and illustrations start with UC. In both cases, the rest of the code is based on the first publication.

contributions: David Gerstein, Horst Schröder (quoted by Brix Lichtenberg)

This page was generated on 2008-02-13 by DVEGEN 4.8d © Harry Fluks 2003.
For more information contact Harry Fluks (hfl at inducks.org - replace the at)