Go, Read: Floyd Gottfredson Comics



One thing that's interesting to me about Floyd Gottfredson is how he used certain visual cues in his strip during the Mickey Mouse adventure days to increase the sense of motion and action. Unlike a lot of cartoonists doing that kind of work that use a lot of intersecting visual elements to play stop and start with the action, most of Gottfredson's work races from left to right, sometimes veering up and out. It's more noticeable in an action scene, but even in a throwaway panel like here the lean of the bodies, the shapes of the faces, the belts and even the bumper work together to hustle the reader from one side of the panel to the other. Crucially, the seedy guy's thumb violates just enough of the vertical element represented by the garage opening to keep it from being a stop. If you read a bunch of Mickey Mouse strips in a row on paper, like in the old Smithsonian collection, Gottfredson's reliance on "lines" is a major reason that the strip has a kind of crazy, careening energy.
 
posted 2:53 am PST | Permalink
 

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