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So the topic on the soda atom story got me thinking. When it comes down to aesthetic and skill who do you prefer between the two?

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Bill Wright's output on Mickey was FAR LESS than Paul Murry, but it can be argued that his stories were far more substantial and long lasting.

PROS:

* Wright - like Murry - came onto the book having "graduated" from being Gottfredson's inker. Wright wrote many of his own stories and of the few that where didn't, his style often added to to the general atmosphere of the story.

* Unlike the team of Murry/Fallberg, many of Wright's stories had a Gottfredsonian flair to them if for no other reason than the simple tone of them. The fact that he wrote his own material probably helped as that seems to be one of the litmus tests for many creators that are remembered in Disney Comics. Now Wright was certainly no Gottfredson/Osborne/deMaris/or Walsh, but he's one of the few Mouse creators of that era to craft a genuinely good adventure yarn with some impact to it - see "Ghost of Maneater Mountain" which I personally think is some his best work all around. When he returned from his hiatus during the Gold Key era, his first story, "The Valley of the Kachinas" utilized a character that previously only Gottfredson had ever used, something that Murry/Fallberg barely (if ever) did at all.

* Unlike Murry, Wright art degradation during the Gold Key years was not QUITE as drastic and off-putting (though it was still pretty "meh"). It's hard to tell if this was more the art in general or the ridiculous mandates as editorial cut pages and got cheaper and cheaper with each issue until there seemed to be obvious lack of care all around from everybody BUT Barks. There was still some bad art to be had, but I'm probably one of the few people who would take the worst of Wright over the worst of Murry any day.

* I find it funny that while Murry's contributions to the Mouse pantheon are far more numerous, it's one of Wright's major contribution that seems to have outlasted quite a bit of Murry's - that being Goofy's nephew, Gilbert. Most people don't know that Gilbert Goof first appeared in a Wright story, not a Murry one. Gilbert was pretty much insufferable and annoying during the Dell/Gold Key days (he's certainly no Max). More often than not you wanted to reach through the book and just strangle the pompous little weasel for how he treated Goofy. But Egmont's approach to him during the Riverside Rovers stories (pretty much a full on personality revamp) almost makes the little brat endearing while keeping him at what makes him work: an insufferable little know-it-all. :) A lot of Murry characters seem to have fallen by the wayside for being somewhat lame (Shamrock Bones comes to mind, although he wasn't a Murry character in origin either), somewhat derivative (as much as I like Dan and Idgit for what they became, it's hard to reconcile the fact that they began life in comics as very weak substitues for Pete and Squinch/Shyster. :(), or somewhat oddball (So is Emil Eagle Gyro Gearloose's antogonistic clumsy inventor rival or a super-braniac Mickey Mouse supervillian? :))

CONS:

* His artwork was always stiff IMO. Nowhere near as stiff as late era Murry, but Murry gets more points because some of his earliest work was pretty dang gorgeous while some of Wrights earliest work was OK but not really *WOW*. I often wonder if that panache was what contributed to Murry getting more stories in Mickey serials than Wright. Shame that it turned out that when all was said and done, as the years went on, it would be Murry who grew to become the worst artist of the two by far.

* His stories never quite hit it off as well as Gottfredson's did. Sure his came the closest, but its kind of like many would-be Barks imitators: often imitated, never duplicated.

* This led to another problem, his talents at his prime were wasted doing "new versions" of Gottfredson stories. Sure his serials were almost always better than Murry's because of this (just look at how good the source was!) but as a result, when Gottfredson finally got his due, a number of Wright's adaptations were seen for being the watered-down version of Gottfredson masterpieces that they were and it left the overall stories that could truly be considered "his", to be almost cut in half. In this case it was just a terrible luck of the draw. :(

* The large gap of no productivity between the middle of the Dell to the middle of the Gold Key era. I kind of feel like we missed out on what could have been his peak had he done more original and better crafted stories. I find it rather ironic that it's the start of both of his tenures at both licensee's that are gave us his best material. Not the end or the middle.

* He created Gilbert. :)

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Paul Murry's output on Mickey was FAR GREATER than Bill Wright's, but it can be argued that his stories while having the greatest impact, also left the most detrimental reputation on Mickey as a whole, leading many to assume that comic book Mickey was a bland and uninteresting character at best for years upon years of his production cycle while the truly good Mickey material never saw the light of day at all...

PROS:

* Early Murry is wonderful. For YEARS I went about hating Murry's mouse because all I'd ever seen was the middle era and the late era (the latter of which is absolute boo-boo IMO). Early era Murry is like looking at an entirely different artist. To this day I do not know what happened to cause an art degradation so drastic, but there is just so much care and detail put into what he did. Sure he was stiff and his expressions were not really varied, but compared to any other Mouse artist of the time, no one could top him - and I think that's why he became the more visible fixture.

* Murry did not write his own material, leaving him at the whims of other writers (talented or no). It seems his best work was done in collaboration with Carl Fallberg - "The Phantom Fires" comes to mind as one serial that is remembered as often as any Barks story. In other words, even if you include his faults - when Murry got it right, he got it right.

* His expansion to the Mouse pantheon while nowhere near as wide and varied as Gottfredsons, did produce some very iconic characters of the period: Scuttle - finally Pete got to play the lead man in a group of two as opposed to playing the dumb hired muscle of Shyster or Squinch, Emil Eagle - say what you will about his identity crisis between the mice and ducks, but Emil's appearances in quite a few Murry Mouse stories are among his most memorable (in particular, "The Case of the Dazzling Hoodoo" - a late era Murry story that is actually quite well written and not bad at all IMO), and Dangerous Dan and Idgit the Midget - who if you think about it, are the penultimate gangster villains of the Mouse Universe. No characters created since have really matched them in terms of what they do and the personalities they share. Especially since neither one really ever overshadows the other, it leads to them completely avoiding the trope of "the little one being the brains and the big one being the idiot" entirely. They're quite a brilliant addition to the rogues gallery who are woefully underutilized to tell you the truth.

* Faults and all, he carried Mickey Mouse artistically when no one else there did. After Wright left for parts unknown, there's no one else on Gold Key remotely as good or as memorable when it came to crafting the Mouse or the Goof simply for the fact that Murry was pretty much all there was or is.

CONS:

* I won't expand on this much since I've talked about this topic before, but while middle-era Murry isn't all that great, late-era Murry is ABSOLUTELY DREADFUL. There are little to no redeeming qualities about his artwork or many of the stories from that period. When we did get a good one (see my comment on "The Dazzling Hoodoo") it was a rarity, but when we got a bad one? Sweet lord in heaven was it bad. It's like he completely stopped trying at some points and craftsmanship just went out the window. At least when Carl Barks' art style changed, his care and craftsmanship did not change one iota no matter how old he got.

* Just because the stories had a lack of personality in the characters doesn't mean that the artwork had to reflect it. Murry had about two or three expressions for Mickey as time went on and that was it. Also there was that one pose of Mickey with his hand on his nose awkwardly, eyes cocked and thinking. It's not a Murry story if you can't find that pose on at least one panel. You can't blame Murry for the writing - which was boring and bad - but when the art is just as boring and bad to match it? Well dangit.

* His characters aren't that memorable. Beyond the characters I listed above, how many memorable side characters and villains can you name from Murry's era? None. There's a reason why Dan, Idgit, Emil, Scuttle and a scant few others survived into the modern age when no one else from that era didn't. They're boring and they were all pretty much the same generic duo of bad guys or helpless good guys or "professor friends" (OH THE PROFESSOR FRIENDS - thank gawd for whoever created Doc Static and stuck with him) all doing the same generic bad guy/god guy/professor guy things. There was no variety whatsoever between them and almost all of them were practically interchangeable in terms of plot AND design. You just can't argue against that.

* Speaking of characters and their usage, if Wright had the chutzpah to recognize and even use Gottfredsonian characters, why couldn't Murry do the same? Adaptations of Gottfredson stories do not count.

* You can't get around the fact that it's Murry's mouse that gave many a bad impression of Mickey in comics that, unfortunately, persists to this day. Thank goodness for Gottfredson getting his credit and what could be called the modern Mickey renaissance taking place because of it.

* He actively used Gilbert. :)

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So who do you side with and why?

I like Bill Wright's mouse a lot better than Murray's. His inking over Gottfredson's pencils is wonderful. Drawing on his own is much better than Murray's post 1955-56 art. Murray was probably the better artist, based on his '40s and very early '50s work. Wrights re-creations of some Gottfredson stories for early '50s WDC & S serials was very good, too. His 1940s and early '50s Mickey stories are very nice.

Mouse Artists in order of my liking their work:

Floyd Gottfredson(1935-55)
Manny Gonzales (inking Gottfredson, own Sunday Pages)
Romano Scarpa (1955-56)
Daan Jippes (Crows story and Newspaper strip)
Bill Wright('40s- inking Gottfredson, own comic book stories)
Ken Hultgren(MM#2)
Carl Barks(Red Hat Mystery and Klondike storyboards)
Paul Murray (early '50s)
Dick Moores('40s-inking Gottfredson, own pencils, early '50s comic books)
Tony Strobl (early '50s)
Jack Bradbury(early-mid '50s)

Quote from user: Robb_KFloyd Gottfredson(1935-55)
Manny Gonzales (inking Gottfredson, own Sunday Pages)
Romano Scarpa (1955-56)
Daan Jippes (Crows story and Newspaper strip)
Bill Wright('40s- inking Gottfredson, own comic book stories)
Ken Hultgren(MM#2)
Carl Barks(Red Hat Mystery and Klondike storyboards)
Paul Murray (early '50s)
Dick Moores('40s-inking Gottfredson, own pencils, early '50s comic books)
Tony Strobl (early '50s)
Jack Bradbury(early-mid '50s)
In my list Gottfredson and Scarpa come first, however, soon after them I place a few other Italians, namely Massimo De Vita, but also for example Giorgio Cavazzano drew excellent Mouse stories. And there are some other classic Italian Mose artists like Sergio Asteriti.

I couldn't really say where I would place Murry. Even stronger meat than Murry himself are the two Murry babies Tello and Bancells fed by Egmont. Those two fellows put the stamp on the Mouse stories in the Egmont publications of the seventies and eighties.

One uses to look at me like a pervert when I say that I find a special savour in that stuff, but the high art of "Naive Mousism", the stories, the drawings, the style, that is own class beyond good and evil. Oh yeah, always again a little fiest when "know-it-all Mickey" has his eyes cocked while bosom buddy "moron Goofy" puts his hand in front of his mouth.

In 50 years they'll get their de-luxe editions with gilt edge, believe me. 8-)

The greatest mouse artists, for my money...

comic strips
1. Gottfredson
2. Gonzales
Who would've thought?

comic books
1. Murry (very original and unmistakable style and what's not to like about it?)
2. Bradbury (great duck artist from the start and great mouse artist as well by the mid-fifties)
3. Wright (style nice to look at, but rather derivative of Gottfredson and Gonzales - faves: "Spook's Island", "Rajah's Treasure", "Black Sorcerer", "Phantom Thief", "Man-Eater Mountain" and the first story with Gilbert)
4. Moores (very bad duck artist, but left behind four great mouse comics: "House of Many Mysteries", "Mechanical Wizard", "Wonderful Whizzix", "Secret of the Whirlpool")
I like the ducks of Strobl and Hubbard, but don't rate their mice highly.

Italy
1. Scarpa
2. Carpi
3. De Vita (son)
4. Cavazzano
5. Chierchini, Asteriti, Gatto

Oh yes, I've forgotten Casty, the brightest hope. ;)

Quote from user: CoolwaterThere are of course many artists who are great in doing ducks as well as mice, e.g. Scarpa, Massimo De Vita, Cavazzano.
Concerning the US American artists, the only one who handled both ducks and mice equally convincing was, in my opinion, Jack Bradbury. Murrys early ducks from 1950 are also charming, but the style was a bit derivative from Taliaferro. His mouse stuff was much more original, and when he started concentrating on that he somehow lost the right touch for the ducks later on.