Thursday 14 July 2011

MANDRAKE ARTWORK IN SHUFFLED SYMPHONIES


'Shuffled Symphonies', Basil Reynolds' illustrated story series in Britain's Mickey Mouse Weekly, initially began with narratives bringing various characters from Disney's 'Silly Symphony' cartoon short series together with regular Disney characters as Mickey and Donald in novel plots. Over the years, storylines evolved into more and more off-Disneyic terrains with Donald et al embarking on various fantasy-oriented adventures. It seems that during the course of this evolution, Reynolds occasionally (or perhaps frequently?) borrowed graphic material from non-Disneyic sources. One such case is in the installement in MMW no. 147 (dated Nov. 26th, 1938) where Donald, Mickey and his twin nephews time-travel to the future. The illustration of the "metal man" in the above scan is clearly redrawn with minor alterations from the illustration of the 'wheel man' in a Mandrake the Magician adventure (with art by Phil Davis) from 1936-37 titled 'Chamber into the X Dimension':

I am certain that the helmeted figure in the lower left corner (or perhaps even the whole background landscape) of the below illustration from the same installement is also redrawn from a non-Disneyic comics, but I cannot immediately pinpoint the source

No comments: