Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #7 [7]
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeWalt Disney's Comics and Stories #7 (April 1941) is one of the earliest surviving issues of what would become the longest-running Disney comic book in the United States — a series that grew to more than 700 issues and, by the mid-1950s, was the best-selling comic book in America. At the time this issue appeared, WDC&S was still entirely a reprint vehicle, translating Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper dailies and Al Taliaferro's Donald Duck strips into full-color comic-book pages for the first time in a monthly anthology format — a format that would soon host Carl Barks's original Duck stories and reshape American funny-animal comics. As only the seventh issue of the Dell run, it represents the series in its purest founding state: a proof of concept that newspaper-strip Disney material could sustain a standalone comic book, which directly paved the way for the original storytelling that followed.
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Walt Disney's Comics and Stories grew directly out of Mickey Mouse Magazine, which Western Publishing had been producing since the mid-1930s; when Disney strip reprints proved commercially viable, Western and Dell converted the magazine into a full comic-book anthology, launching WDC&S with its October 1940 first issue. Issue #7, dated April 1941, was produced under the same reprint-only editorial model that governed the title through at least issue #23 — strips from the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse daily and Al Taliaferro's Donald Duck panel strips were reformatted and colored for the comic-book page. The creative team credited in the issue includes Gottfredson, Taliaferro, Merrill De Maris, Ted Thwaites, Ted Osborne, and cover artist Tom Wood, all working within the studio pipeline rather than as independent comics authors.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published April 1941 by Dell Comics, catalogued as Vol. 1 #7; on-sale date confirmed by the U.S. Catalog of Copyright Entries, Part 2, Periodicals, 1941.
- 68 pages, full color, with a ten-cent cover price — the standard format for the early Dell WDC&S run.
- The issue is an all-reprint package: every strip was reformatted from existing Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse newspaper dailies and Al Taliaferro Donald Duck comic strips, consistent with the series' editorial policy through issue #23.
- Credited contributors include Floyd Gottfredson (Mickey Mouse stories), Al Taliaferro (Donald Duck strips), Merrill De Maris, Ted Thwaites, and Ted Osborne; Tom Wood is credited as cover artist.
- Characters appearing in the issue include Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Minnie Mouse, Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, and Peg-Leg Pete — representing nearly the full core Disney cast of the era.
- Story titles documented for this issue include 'Mickey Mouse in the Secret Service' and a cluster of Donald Duck and Pluto gag strips such as 'Fixing the Elevator,' 'It's a Crate Life,' and 'The Kibitzer,' among roughly two dozen short pieces.
- WDC&S is identified by multiple sources as the flagship Disney comics title; it was launched in October 1940 as a direct successor to Mickey Mouse Magazine after Western Publishing's Dell-distributed Disney strip reprints proved a strong seller.
- The first original story ever created for WDC&S did not appear until issue #24 (August 1942), meaning issue #7 sits squarely within the founding all-reprint era of the series.
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #670 (2006)
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