Pinocchio

The wooden puppet carved by the kindly toymaker Geppetto, Pinocchio dreams of becoming a real boy — guided by his conscience, Jiminy Cricket, through a series of adventures and moral trials in the classic Disney adaptation of Carlo Collodi's fairy tale.

Few characters carry the weight of fairy-tale legend into the Golden Age of comics quite like Pinocchio, who made his four-color debut in Mickey Mouse Magazine #3 [51] back in 1939. Born from one of the most beloved stories ever told, this wooden dreamer found a natural home in the warm, imaginative world of Western Publishing, sharing pages across the decades with icons like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Jiminy Cricket, Goofy, and Pluto. His appearances stretch across nearly eight decades — from that Golden Age debut all the way to 2018 — turning up in beloved anthology staples like Walt Disney Comics Digest and Dell Giant, as well as the irreverent pages of Cracked. Twenty-seven catalog appearances may sound modest, but for a character whose story has resonated across generations and media, each one is a little piece of comics history worth hunting down.