Wednesday 18 July 2007

Mickey Mouse by Roy Nelson?

As some of you might know newspaper cartoonist Roy Nelson was employed by Disney in the early 30's. A lot of Roys wonderful non-Disney artwork can be found on Shane Glines excellent site Cartoonretro, but if you're not a member you can find some samples at Roys MySpace profile.
Like this one, that took the liberty to snatch from the MySpace gallery just to give you a quick sample of his work:

Beautiful, eh?

But what about his Disney art?
Some says he worked with Gottfredson on the dailies, but checking the online index "Inducks" there are no listed credits for him on any comics at all! Guess it's hard to figure out who did what almost 80 years afterwards when all of the people involved are since long gone.
However thase scans (taken from eBay) shows that Roy Nelson might have been involved in the artwork for "The Adventures of Mickey Mouse". Or was he? Does anyone know for sure who did the art for these?
Following later this week will be some examples of dailies fron 1930-31 that surely are not by Floyd Gottfredson. With a Gottfredson library coming up, let's hope we can straighten this out and finally get the right credits on the dailies. And maybe we can add Roy to the Inducks listings? *If* he actually did any dailies...

First the covers for the Adv. of MM No. 1:


Some interior pages:






And finally two more covers(?).



Now: Are these really by Roy Nelson?

[Edit July 20, 2007: I've been looking at these pictures a thousand times now since I uploaded them and I must say that my instinct tells med Roy had nothing to do with them. If he did he might just have inked or colored. The style looks more like the strips credited to Earl Duvall in 1930-31. So maybe Duvall was involved in this book?
Saw that Roy was listed as inker only for the MM dailies, on the cover 3 page in Mickey Mouse 244.
And having studied the dailies from that year the style varies both in inking and in pencilling several times. Mickeys proportions changes and for example all of a sudden after the section David describes in the comments here, Mickey becomes really tall and odd looking. If Roy only did ink the strips I guess we'll never know when he did it.
Until someone ask the Disney archives between wich dates he was employed. that is...]

With the scanner now working I hope to scan some Flapper Fanny panels tonight. Stay tuned!
Also: more vintage swimsuit fashion pics coming up! You asked for it! :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Joakim,

The two weeks of odd-looking dailies in the summer of 1930 were once attributed to Nelson by Alberto Becattini. But Alberto based his educated guess only on the fact that (A) the strips obviously weren't by Gottfredson, Gramatky, or Duvall, and (B) Nelson was also in the comics department at about the same time. So no element of art identification factored into the guess.
Get out your WALT DISNEY TREASURES DVD with Mickey's "Pioneer Days" and watch the lengthy sequence right at the start where Mickey and Minnie are singing and playing the banjo on their wagon train. Studio records show that it was animated by Jack King, who also used that same really weird drawing style in other cartoon scenes: Mickey has vertical pie-cuts in his eyes, a generally bulbous figure, and (the real giveaway!) buttons on the bottoms of his shoes! Look at the two mystery weeks of 1930 dailies and the style matches precisely. So I can state without a doubt that King at least penciled those two weeks... and, frankly, the style is primitive enough that I can't believe the comparably stylish, sophisticated Nelson did the inking.
As for the ADVS OF MM storybooks, one might be by Nelson... but then the other must not be, as the drawing style varies radically from one to the other. I guess you don't have book two, or...?
Thoughts? Tomatoes?

Francoisw said...

In Inducks, we had the credits to Roy Nelson for these few strips. We changed that to Jack King some 5 years ago when David told us about his investigations.