There was also a comic strip that was inspired by these films called Walt Disney's True Life Adventures. This was a daily comic panel series that ran from March 1955 until 1973. The comic panels were written by 2007 Disney Legend inductee Dick Huemer. He got his start at Barre-Bowers Studios as a tracer on Mutt and Jeff. He eventually became an animator for the studios again working on Mutt and Jeff, but this time the cartoons. In 1923, he joined Fleischer Studios and was one of the top animators there. The most notable project he worked on there was Out of the Inkwell. In 1927, Huemer worked for the infamous Charles Mintz as an animator on Krazy Kat.
Then, in 1933, he got his start with Disney as an animator working on several of the early Silly Symphonies including The Tortoise And The Hare (1934), The Wise Little Hen (1934), and The Band Concert (1935). He later directed some of the Fab Five's cartoon shorts including The Whalers (1938) and Goofy And Wilbur (1939). Next, he wrote several of the stories for Der Fuehrer's Face (1942) and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953). Lastly, he also worked as a story director on several animation features including Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), Saludos Amigos (1943), Make Mine Music (1946), and Alice in Wonderland (1951). After leaving Disney in 1948 to pursue his own comic strip called Buck O'Rue, he returned to work for Disney a short three years later. In 1955, Dick was tasked to do the writing for the True Life Adventures daily comic panel which he did until he retired in February 1973. This also ended the almost 20 year run of this educational and quite beautiful, not to mention very cool, daily comic.
The illustrations for TLA were done by George Wheeler who was an inbetweener at Disney in the 1950s. He later went on to work for Hanna-Barbera as a layout artist and character designer from 1968 to 1979 on various Saturday morning cartoons such as Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, Superfriends, Dynomutt Dog Wonder, The Harlem Globetrotters, and The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, of which I was a huge fan of all of those growing up. Then, from 1972 to 1974 he worked as a layout artist at Filmation on a handful of projects including Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, and Star Trek. Just like with Huemer, he was the illustrator for the entire run of the TLA series.
Well, about a week ago, I came across a nice collection of these Walt Disney's True Life Adventures one-panel comic strips. The owner had purchased these from an unclaimed storage locker and knew that someone might enjoy these. Ding, ding, ding. I was the lucky recipient. The original owner had clipped these comics out of the Louisville Times newspaper starting in October 1955 through July 1962. Unfortunately, the title was also clipped off of each one and glued into three faux scrapbooks made out of notebooks. The owner used three identical notebooks and numbered each side of the sheet. There are 515 full pages, and by full pages, I mean four comics per page. That comes to 1,060 True Life Adventures comics!The last sheet has two comics on one side and then an undated one on the last. But, on the page with two comics, the individual also included a "missing" list and a notation of when and where these comics were clipped. So, for the price of $25, I couldn't pass it up. At first, I thought I'd resell them on eBay, but, after I started looking at them and the care the owner put into these albums, not to mention what a gem these comics are, I realized I must keep these in my personal collection. So, for the forseeable future, I'll post four new comics as part of True Life Tuesdays. Enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment