Keskustelujen arkisto

David Gerstein <DGE at ECN.egmont.com> wrote:

Paul Murry was mainly an artist, Sigvald, and almost never wrote the stories
he drew.

Are you sure? DD&Co seldom mentiones other persons names together with Paul
Murry's name when they print his stories.

But, what you here tell us seems to explain why some of Tello's stories are
so close to Murry's, they may be written by the same guys.

Anyway, if you are right, Paul Murry may no longer deserve to be counted
together with the greatest artists like Gottfredson, Barks, Rosa, Van Horn,
Rota, etc. who normally do all the work themselves.

Sigvald :-)

Stefan Person wrote:

>> Anyway, if you are right, Paul Murry may no
>> longer deserve to be counted together with
>> the greatest artists like Gottfredson [...]
>> who normally do all the work themselves.
>
> Gottfredson usually didn't write his own
> stories either...

Aha!!! Maybe that's why many people seems to prefer Donald Duck to Mickey
Mouse... Barks, Rosa, Van Horn, Rota, etc. have usually done the whole job
themselves - making their production more personal.

This is just like in music, most great artists writes most of their own
material.

Sigvald :-)

Sigvald Gr?sfjeld jr. wrote:

> So what about enclosing some more serious stuff instead? One idea could be
> for Egmont to hire Don Rosa to do a set of drawings for a new Donald Duck
> deck of playing cards ? presenting different Duckburg-characters on every
> single card, just like in the famous "Iraqi 'Most-Wanted' Deck of Playing
> Cards". Such an enclosure would definitely not encourage any harassment
> among innocent kids.

Sounds like a fun idea. I can imagine what kind of collectors item this
would be. Finnish Aku Ankka actually enclosed a set of duck-playing
cards less than a year ago. Only court cards had pictures, though.

Playingcards could be said to encourage kids to illegal gambling, or
something... :-)

What else could be included? Personally I?m in the need of those magnets
that you can put to fridge's door, so Disney ones would be fun. Hmmm. I
can see myself keeping the low-budjet shopping-lists (aka
"end-of-the-month-shopping-lists") up there with a Scrooge-magnet. On a
pay day I could use Gus Goose to carry a letter-size list of all the
delicacies I want to eat (it might inspire me to get so lazy as to let
the wife do the shopping, as well).

--
- Kai Saarto
http://www.perunamaa.net/donrosa

Hi!

>>>> Sigvald Gr?sfjeld jr. wrote:
>>>> Anyway, if you are right, Paul Murry may no longer deserve to be counted
>>>> together with the greatest artists like Gottfredson [...] who normally do all the work
themselves.

Stefan replied:
>>> Gottfredson usually didn't write his own stories either...

Not exactly.
Gottfredson did write the early strips he worked on.
Webb Smith helped on "Blaggard Castle" (1932-3).
Gottfredson plotted the stories, Osborne / de Maris scripted them with him, then he edited & drew
them.
Bill Walsh eventually did all the writing, but even then Gottfredson's editing was crucial.

Gottfredson *was* a great artist / author. The writers were here to help, but it's his plotting &
editing that made the Mickey strips-- a rather coherent whole, even, despite the evolution: just
like you can identify a Barks story despite the various graphic styles & kinds of stories, all these
Mickey stories are clearly Gottfredson stories.

All this is told in the excerpt below from Disney Archivist David R. Smith's 1975 interview with
Floyd Gottfredson, reprinted in "Mickey Mouse in Color-- 1930s Disney Comic Strip Classics" (pp
103-5)...
[I broke Gottfredson's answers into paragraphs]

All the best,

Olivier

* * * * * * * * * *

Disney assigned Ted Osborne to the Mickey strips to help Gottfredson in 1933 ("Pluto and the
Dogcatcher").

(DS)
How did the Comic Strip Department evolve? And did you head it because you were the only one there
to start with?

(FG)
Yes, and this is how it grew. It was a one-man department at first and then, as the need arose
through the years, I just added men. I meant to tell you about Osborne and de Maris. Ted Osborne and
Dick Creedon were writers on a comedy-variety radio show that ran on KHJ-- and I believe it was a
daily thing, so it was a lot of work to write and produce. Wlat brough the two fellows out from
this radio show to develop a Mickey Mouse radio show. They produced some shows, but it didn'tl last
very long. When the radio show failed, Walt had to find something else for Ted and Dick to do. So,
he gave me Ted Osborne to write the comic strip material, and Dick Creedon went into Publicity.
Publicity had be then developed into a three- or four-man art department under Tom Wood, and they
had one publicity writer.
Ted Osborne was my first regular writer. I had written everything up to that point. This was now in
1933, I think. So, from that time on, Ted and I worked together.I plotted the continuities because I
was used to them. For some strange reason all of the writers I ever had through the years p to Bill
Walsh were clever writers, but they couldn't plot. These fellows were good at dialog, and especially
good at puns, and puns were used quite extensively in comic strips then, and they were good enough
at it that they"ve been mentioned several times in teh anthologies about comics, but for some reason
they just had no aptitude for plotting continuities.
So, I continued plotting the things, and the way we would work-- I would work up the general plot,
the story line, for the continuities, and then we would sit down and talk out what we planned to do
for the coming week. We'd pretty work out all the business, and generally the dialog, and then the
writer would take this and break it down into strips and write it up on the typewriter. I'd go over
that and edit it, and then I'd draw the things.
So Merrill de Maris at that time was in the Story Department, so he traded them. [Walt] took Osborne
up to story and sent de Maris won to me. After three of four months, something like that, he became
unhappy with Osborne in Story, and was now becoming impressed with what de Maris was doing on the
comic strips, so he traded again. I was never consulted on these things. Walt would just call and
inform me that he was making the switch.

(DS)
Perhaps these guys were both good at comic strip but neither of them was good at animation story.

(FG)
Yes, well, it was not only that, but I guess the bull sessions that we were having, and the fact
that i was diredcting the general line of the continuities was the thing that made them hang
together. Comic strip historians have asked me why with the three or four writers i had over the
years, the general flavor and spirit of the continuities remained the same, and why the
personalities of the writers weren't reflected in the stories that they write. I guess the answer
is that I plotted all of them through the years, and I edited everything, and we had bull sessions
and talkjed over the business.
Well, this was what was happening to Osborne and de Maris. Working as we did down thee, they were
turning out good work. But Walt thought that they were doing everything-- the plotting, the editing,
and everything else. Finally, in late '37 or early '38, Walt made the last change and sent de Maris
back to me and took Osborne back into Story.
[...]
De Maris was a very talented writer, but Osborne was sort of meachanical. e had a tremendous gag
file, but he did everything by formula. So, i had to make a decision, and decided to keep de Maris.
Osborne left the Studio then, and de Maris stayed with me until '42.
[...]
It developed that Bill [Wlash] was part owner of the Margaret Ettinger Advertising Agency in
Hollywood, and h'd been working as a gag writer and public relations man for Burns and Allen, and
also for Bergen and McCarthy. He was also a friend of Vern Caldwell's, and Vern had been trying to
get him out here for quite a while as a publicity writer, but Bill was so big that the Studio
couldn't afford to pay him what he had to have in order to join the staff. So Vern had talked to
Hal, and said, "If Floyd could use him on the comic strips, then between the two jobs we could
afford him". So, I told Vern that I would like to give him a try, and Bill joined the staff. I
worked wiht Bill for the first two or three months quite closely. I had to practically rewrite
everything that he did at first because he was so production-minded that it would have taken four
strips to draw what he wrote for one strip. It was this sort of a thing with him. But all the
talent ad ability were there; it was just a matter of working him into the process of learning the
limitations of writing for comic strps. Of course, he eventually learned this very quickly. He was
such a talented guy.
[...]
Then, he took over the writing and the plotting on his own, and all I did was edit as he'd bring
these things in. We just couldn't get him to pare the dialog and the business in the strips down to
the comic strip's limitations, so I said, "Look-- write everything you want into them. We would much
rather have more things than we can use than not enough. You give them to me and I'll pare thel down
to the comic strip format, so that they'll work in there". So, this is the way we worked together.
Gonzy-- [Manuel] Gonzales-- especially would get so exasperated. I wouldn't attempt to cut out the
description and the business with the props so much as I would the dialog when I edited them. Then I
would draw in just what I felt was the best of the props and the business that he suggested, and
leave the rest out. But Gonzy had a problem with this because he wanted to draw everything in, and
he couldn't. There was too much work, and he beefed about Bill writing so much stuff into it all
the time to apoint where we began to refer to Bill as "Cecil B. de Walsh".

SIGVALD:

>>Paul Murry was mainly an artist, Sigvald, and almost never wrote the
stories
>>he drew.
>
>Are you sure? DD&Co seldom mentiones other persons names together with Paul
>Murry's name when they print his stories.
We don't publish many Murry stories these days. When we do use them,
about 50% of the time we aren't sure who wrote them. So we list Murry alone
in the credits. But that doesn't mean he was responsible for the story
writing. We *say* he *drew* the story. That's what we know.
Klaus Spillman interviewed Murry for a 1982 issue of THE DUCKBURG
TIMES fanzine. He asked Murry if he had invented any of Mickey's supporting
characters himself. Murry answered:
"No. Remember, I never did a script."
Murry also said:
"At my age, I prefer not to spend all my time drawing Mickey Mouse.
I'm just not that interested."
So not only did he not invent Mouse mythology, it seems like the desire
wasn't there.

>But, what you here tell us seems to explain why some of Tello's stories are
>so close to Murry's, they may be written by the same guys.
Sorry, nope. Murry's most famous stories were written, generally, by
Carl Fallberg, Don Christensen, Vic Lockman, and Del Connell. Tello's
stories were mostly written by early Egmont writers, mostly worked out of
Britain and Denmark.
The similarity in storytelling style comes because the Egmont
writers grew up on the Murry stories (or rather, Fallberg, Christensen, etc.
stories) and tried to imitate them.

>Anyway, if you are right, Paul Murry may no longer deserve to be counted
>together with the greatest artists like Gottfredson, Barks, Rosa, Van Horn,
>Rota, etc. who normally do all the work themselves.
> [...]
>This is just like in music, most great artists writes most of their own
>material.
Sigvald, I am hurt by your generalization. Greatness is not measured
by whether a writer can also draw. Or by whether an artist can also write.
Neither is being lazy, or one *bit* less creative, by concentrating on a
single task.
There are *great* Disney writers who never drew a single duck. And
*great* Disney artists (like Murry) who never wrote a single mouse. Some of
these creators I will admire for the rest of my life.

STEFAN:

>Gottfredson usually didn't write his own stories either...
He didn't *script* them after 1932, but he did *plot* them until
1943- a job that's still exceptionally important (because it's typicallys
the plotter who defines the *characterizations* in a story, including
Mickey's personality, desires, and decisions). And since Gottfredson also
edited the stories (as head of the Comic Strip Department), he intimately
supervised the scripts that were made from his plots, following them all the
way through production.
I rest in attributing Gottfredson's most classic stories to
Gottfredson. Of course, scripters like Merrill de Maris were talented, too!

SIGVALD again:

>> Gottfredson usually didn't write his own
>> stories either...
>
>Aha!!! Maybe that's why many people seems to prefer Donald Duck to Mickey
>Mouse...
As I've just made clear, Gottfredson actually was very intimately
involved with the writing.
Meanwhile, I point out that from the 1940s to the 1980s,
Gottfredson's work was not easily available in many countries beside Italy.
In Italy, Mickey remained a popular character; perhaps not quite as
popular as Donald, but pretty close. Evidently, instead of turning people
away from Mickey, Gottfredson had the power to keep readers interested in
Mickey. When readers had an opportunity to actually *read* Gottfredson, that
is.

David
(listening to a Three Tenors recording now... do you think it's less
of an artistic work because the singers didn't write the music themselves?)

Hey Sigvald,

>> From the 1940s to the 1980s, Gottfredson's
>> work was not easily available in many countries
>> beside Italy.
>
>Not entirely correct! In Scandinavia a few giant-books featuring old
>Gottfredson classics were published during the 1970's:
[snip]

Oops, you're right. I meant to type 1970s, not 1980s.

David

Joe Torcivia (long time no "read" 8-):

> I just shake my head at some of the comments I read here...

Most of us do. 8-)

> Over the
> years, I certainly haven't seen anywhere near the number of
> "other artists" imitating or "tributing" Gottfredson
> (...certainly his later, more modern look, against which
> Murry would be judged), Manuel Gonzalez, or anyone else.
> More of what I've seen was "Murry-influenced" than anything else!

Gottfredson-inspired artwork can be found a lot in Italy since the 50s
(Scarpa, De Vita) and in Denmark since the 90s (Ferioli).
IMO, *most* of these are much better than Denmark's Murry imitations.

Sigvald:

> IMO it's the writer who's the most important artist
> behind a story.

I've seen many good stories spoiled by bad artists...
(e.g. Pete Alvarado on Dick Kinney, or Bob Gregory on Bob Gregory).
And to my eyes that's worse than a badly written story
with beautiful art.

--Harry.