Mickey All-Stars | Review

Mickey All-Stars
Written and illustrated by various
Fantagraphics Books
978-1-68396-369-1
Ages 10 and Up

As Mickey All-Stars opens, Mickey Mouse is visiting a carnival with his best pal Goofy when he enters the local funhouse called the “Door to More Doors.” The funhouse takes Mickey into a reality-hopping experience. He travels from dimension to dimension and meets dinosaurs, man-eating plants, mummies, a haunted house, and more. On his journey, Mickey encounters other-dimensional versions of his arch-nemesis Pete, the Phantom Blot, and his old pals Goofy, Donald, Minnie, and Pluto. There’s a brand new adventure on every page, and it took the talents of 47 international cartoonists to tell it!

The French publication Éditions Glénat started to create their own Mickey Mouse comics in 2016 to celebrate Mickey’s 90th birthday approaching in 2018.

The publisher gave the 47 creators an Oubapo storytelling set-up. Oubapo is an abbreviation of the French phrase Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle. The creators had a deliberate artistic constraint: They could tell any story they wanted, but it could only fill one page, and Mickey had to enter a door in the first panel and exit another door in the last panel. With so many creators, an amazing variety of adventures takes place between both doors. Italian Disney artist extraordinaire Giorgio Cavazzno created the opening and final pages. In between, the stories can be read in any order. The book’s artwork styles range from traditional to abstract.

The book provides an alphabetical listing of the All-Star line up of cartoonists and a short biography of each.

Mickey All-Stars is a fun artistic journey and an easy recommend for Disney comic fans and fans of the mouse. I’m looking forward to more reprinted collections from Éditions Glénat published by Fantagraphics Books.

Filed under: All Ages, Graphic Novels, Reviews