From Bob Pfeffer comes the following question…
I recently picked up a copy of Mickey Mouse #107 which says on the cover, "The NEW Mickey Mouse! New Art! New Adventures!" When I opened it up, I saw what was clearly the artwork of Dan Spiegle. It was not a rush job either, it was top tier Spiegle. But the odd thing was that all the characters and backgrounds were drawn in the usual Spiegle manner in this spy story except the characters of Mickey and Goofy, who were on-model cartoon characters.
Mickey was about half the size of a standard human character. The plot involved a secret agent group called P.I. (Police International) recruiting Mickey to work for them and hunt down bad guys because Mickey was famous for already doing that. It was played straight with Goofy getting a few laugh lines. It was an odd mix, probably trying to ride the wave of popularity of James Bond and other spy based entertainment of the day.
Credits I've found for this issue online say artwork is by Spiegle and Paul Murry. How did that work? Did Spiegle leave blank spaces for the Disney characters and Murry filled them in? Or were the Disney characters drawn and then Spiegle created the rest of the artwork around that? Was the artwork passed back and forth from pencils to inks or did each artist do their work completely and then send the artwork to the other? How did the editor handle this whole situation? Was the comic laid out by the editor so it could be planned who did what?
It looks like this approach continued for the next two issues of Mickey Mouse, but after issue 109, Spiegle was no longer doing Mickey stories. I found the whole issue fascinating to look at and read. I'll need to try and hunt down issues 108 and 109. Any insights into this would be greatly appreciated.
You've come to the right place because back when I was working for Western Publishing, I asked about these issues myself and discussed them with Dan and also with Chase Craig, who was the editor, and Don R. Christensen, who wrote those issues. Here's how it went down…
Sales on the Mickey Mouse comic book were dipping…a little, not a lot. Someone over at Disney, taking note of the then-current James Bond craze, suggested this idea. This was back when Western Publishing was doing the Disney comics under license and the guy over at Disney — whose name no one remembered — had the power to insist that they at least try it.
They tried it. Don wrote the scripts. Dan Spiegle would lay the pages out roughly in pencil. Dan was one of those artists who almost always inked his own work and what he did in the pencil stage was always very rough with no backgrounds so that the editor could okay how the story was being "told" and the letterer could letter in the copy. He did 90% of the drawing in the ink stage.
The letterer on this story, by the way, was a gentleman whose name was either Rome Siemen or Rome Siemon. I was never able to nail down the exact spelling. He was a letterer for Western Publishing's Los Angeles office, lettering thousands of Dell and Gold Key comics from around 1952 until around 1970 when he died (I believe) and was largely succeeded by Bill Spicer. In the entire history of American comic books, there has probably been no one who had so much work published without almost anyone knowing his name.
Either before or after the lettering but probably after, Spiegle's rough pencils would go to Paul Murry. Murry — another unsung talent in comics — was the main artist for Mickey Mouse stories for Western from the late forties until Western stopped producing Disney comics in 1984.
He was, like most of the artists who drew Disney comics for Western including Carl Barks, a man who'd worked for the studio and later found he preferred the lifestyle of working at home, freelancing for Western. He did other comics for the firm, as well. Murry would pencil and ink the figures of Mickey and Goofy, then the pages would go back to Dan Spiegle to be finished.
According to Chase Craig, he didn't think any of this was a good idea. He said no one at Western did…and even before there were any sales figures received on those issues, the whole idea was dropped. Other folks at Disney saw the work in progress and said things like "Are you mad?" and there was a strong outcry from the publishers of Disney comics in other countries.
Don Christensen was pretty sure he wrote at least one more issue that was never published. He wasn't sure whether or not it was even drawn. Spiegle vaguely remembered starting on another story but being stopped before it was completed.
I thought it was kind of interesting as a novelty…and at a time when few comic books were at all experimental — especially something as staid and steeped in tradition as a primal Disney comic. In 1966, the idea everywhere was that every issue should be in the same style as the issue before…and giving any comic book a "new look" was rare. It was something you only did when it was on the verge of being canceled and Mickey Mouse, even when its sales were down a bit back then, was not in any such peril.
I asked Chase if when the sales figures finally came in, they were up or down. He said, "I don't think I even bothered to check. We weren't about to do it again."
