Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1, review: hard boiled Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1, review
Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1 inaugurates a new reissue, consisting of six hardback volumes that will be released every two months, collecting all 12 episodes of the original magazine, of the cult series originally released in 1999 and inspired by hard boiled and noir literature. This is a series defined on more than one "revolutionary" occasion because it gave Mickey Mouse's adventures an unprecedented and mature edge trying to capitalize on the one hand on the success of PK - Paperinik New Adventures and on the other on an intuition of Tito Faraci who with Dalla Parte Sbagliata, a story that appeared on Mickey Mouse in 1998, he had shown how much and how the world of Mickey Mouse could be bent to the crime / noir genre, recovering the lesson taught by Floyd Gottfredson without necessarily transcending the parody genre of which the Disney characters had become sublime interpreters.With a base of stories that touch in a more or less tangent way the genre that began to appear on Topolino as early as 1997 and the curiosity aroused in a slice of public and critics by the aforementioned story of Tito Faraci (Panini Disney is reprinting these stories that pioneered Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine in the TopoNoir series you can find our review of the first volume), for the editorial team at the time, extremely inclined to experimentation, it was natural to launch a new magazine in which those intuitions were fully developed and gutted.
Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1: welcome to Anderville
Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1 collects, in full version, the first two issues of the magazine of the same name. MMMM # 0 (cover date May 1999) entitled Anderville and written by Tito Faraci with pencils by the great Giorgio Cavazzano and MMMM # 1 (cover date July 1999) entitled The Link written by Tito Faraci and Ezio Sisto with pencils by Alessandro Perina, Andrea Cagol and inks by Sandro Zemolin.Mickey suddenly receives a call from Anderville, a hectic and smoky metropolis overlooking the ocean, who invites him to go to the city to take care of the bureaucratic tasks related to the co-ownership of a detective agency. Amidst impatience and dismay, Mickey learns that his partner should be his old college friend Sonny Mitchell. Sonny, a big joker with little desire to study, really had what it takes to be a detective and had taken leave of Mickey Mouse, leaving the University of Mickey Mouse about 15 years earlier, with the promise that he would open an agency and make him his partner.
What seemed like a hoax now, after many years, had turned out to be a tragic truth: Sonny is indeed missing. Mickey then decides to go to Anderville not only to sign the proverbial papers but also to investigate the disappearance of his friend. But Anderville is not Topolinia, where the police have always appreciated his help now against Gambadilegno now against Black Spot, and the investigation will be much more complex and difficult among dangerous gangsters, unlikely allies never too inclined to fully respect the law and discovery. of a great conspiracy that will not lead to the discovery of Sonny.
For this reason the Anderville police tell Mickey Mouse not to leave the city until further notice. Stuck in a city that is anything but reassuring, Mickey Mouse can only reopen the agency and accept new more or less profitable cases. Among these, that of finding Tomoka Marshall, a silent man just released from prison and at the center of a manhunt by both the authorities and criminals.
The man in fact served a sentence for a robbery in his accomplices had managed to escape. But because Tomoka has taken all the blame without ever giving other names. What was behind the robbery of a computer company? Who really were his accomplices and why does Tomoka seem to be hunting them? But above all, who was the instigator of the coup? Mickey Mouse will have to use all his skills (including trying his hand at savat in a notorious gym) to "intercept" Tomoka before he can commit a crime he could regret and which he could not be exonerated from.
Mickey Mouse but hard boiled
From the very first pages of Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1 you can feel how the series you are about to read has nothing to do with traditional Disney production in the same way it did with PK - Paperinik New Adventures. There, however, the superhero genre was mediated by humor, by a more "light" approach in which the Disney connotations were self-evident and the suspension of disbelief was the guiding thread both narratively and structurally.The first episode of Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1 instead hits hard and without filters, taking the stylistic features of hard boiled narration and grafting them, organically and with great mastery by a patient but determined Tito Faraci, in the Disney universe of which, however, there is no trace except in his anthropomorphic protagonists. Anderville is not Topolinia: geography changes radically. No more single-family terraced houses and clean air but skyscrapers, dark alleys, traffic and neon lights.
The change of setting allows the screenwriter to immediately insert two cornerstones of hard boiled narration: the narrative in analysts ( Topolino tells of his investigation pressed into the Anderville police station by the gruff Inspector Clayton) and the use of the voiceover, with Mickey Mouse becoming both an extradiegetic and self-explanatory narrator, finding in the precise use of the caption his comic form as privileged as it was. indirect discourse in fiction.
By doing so, Faraci can begin to unravel a plot, far from obvious in its final resolution, tense and made up of sudden twists and in which new characters begin to emerge who will become supporting actors recurring (like Inspector Clayton himself, of whom we begin to discover something more already in the second episode of the volume) alders for characterization, graphics and otherwise, and character with the usual shoulders that Mickey had surrounded himself up to then, one above all the slouchy but effective Goofy.
In Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1 nothing and nobody are what they seem and Mickey learns it quickly by dealing with corruption, greed and careerism. What is only suggested in the world building of the first episode Anderville, with Mickey Mouse progressively losing his naive gaze on reality, is then made evident in the robust script of the second episode The Link. Disney's slap stick gags give way to real action scenes with real guns and real risks, humor gives way to an abrasive and disenchanted (but never black and brutal) irony while the game of misunderstandings typical of humorous narration becomes a game of prey and predators.
For these reversals of the typical assumptions of the Disney narrative, combined with a simple but terribly effective world building, Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine 1 is still today a "revolutionary" narrative also managing to withstand the wear and tear of time and the massive dose of similar proposals that came immediately afterwards as well as contemporary ones.
Cavazzano and the change of paradigm
furrow of a series of small but substantial alterations that metabolize some of the classic styles of hard boiled comics within the traditional Disney style. Not a simple job that could only be done with class and elegance by an absolute master like Giorgio Cavazzano.The first element that is immediately evident on reading is the greater density of the Cavazzano panel and its construction which finds an unprecedented dynamism in a play of joints between horizontal and vertical. The traditional and reassuring pattern of Disney's horizontality in fact gives way to a verticality and large squares (including inserts and borders) in which the environment becomes a real character to be played and in which a rough hatch is often left on display. and decided that it goes to the limit of chiaroscuro. In this sense the palette is all tending to more barren shades and shades, the backgrounds are always flat and homogeneous but there is greater attention to the play of light (creating very evocative cones and shadow areas) as well as to the use of two-colors for some sequences.
Cavazzano puts back on the field all the experience gained on series like Altai & Jonson creating an Anderville teeming with characters that move more or less in the background and outlining decidedly Gouldian antagonists in their excessive grotesque charge even though being anthropomorphic.
If Cavazzano offers his interpretation of the hard boiled Disney, Alessandro Perina, Andrea Cagol and Sandro Zemolin, in the second story of the volume begin to personalize the intuitions of the Venetian master. Here the table is less dense but the squares become large leaving the possibility of using unprecedented bird's eye shots in detailed and rich environments. We even get to the use of double splash-pages in a continuous search for action and dynamism that goes well with the very tense screenplay.
The stroke is made up of a more continuous and sweet line, the hatching disappears scratchy, but on the other hand the inks are more devoted to giving greater and immediate expressiveness to the characters.
