Fantagraphics’ “Mickey All-Stars”: The Mouse Goes OuBaPo!

For Mickey Mouse’s 90s birthday, French publisher Glenat put together a tribute album. They gathered an amazing cadre of European artists, and let them loose for a page each to tell a Mickey Mouse story.

They didn’t need to conform to the Disney house style, and the results are amazing.

Thankfully for English language speakers, Fantagraphics brought the book over to the States at the end of 2020.

This is a book that made me gasp audibly on a page turn on more than one occasion. There’s some good-looking stuff in here.

The Mouse Credits Everyone

All the Artists

In order, here’s the list of artists contributing to this book. Your eyes may glaze over, but I’ll call out a few in particular over the course of this review. I’ll also link here to names whose work I’ve reviewed before on this site. There are some “old friends” on this list:

Alfred, Batem, Federico Bertolucci, Guillaume Bouzard, Brremaud, Bruno, Silvio Camboni, Eric Cartier, Giorgio Cavazzano, Florence Cestac, Joris Chamblain, Jean-Christophe Chauzy, Clarke, Nicolas Dab, Dav, Pieter De Poortere, Mathilde Domecq, Massimo Fecchi, Cesar Ferioli, Denis-Pierre Filippi, Flix, Godi, Eric Herenguel, Nicolas Juncker, Nicolas Keramidas, Antonio Lapone, Marc Lechuga, Thierry Martin, BenGrrr, Jose-Luis Munuera, Alexis Nesme, Fabrice Parme, Mike Peraza, Fabrizio Petrossi, Jean-Philippe Peyraud, Johan Pilet, Michel Pirus, Arnaud Poitevin, Nicolas Pothier, Pascal Regnauld, Francisco Rodriguez, Marco Rota, Olivier Supiot, Tebo, Ulf K., Sascha Wustefeld, Zanzim

There are a few names on that list I’ve always wanted to do a review for, but their books just aren’t available in English yet. In the future, I hope I can link to more names…

What’s Going On?

It’s Mickey Mouse OuBaPo. (See “Beginning BD: What Is OuBaPo? And Why Is It So Cool?“.)

The framing pages are drawn by the great Giorgio Cavazzano and Joris Chamblain. In it, Mickey and Goofy are at a carnival. Mickey steps through a door and, for the next 42 pages, enters other worlds that the artists set up for him. The closing page brings him back to the carnival for a big surprise.

Every artist gets one page to tell a story. Mickey must enter the scene through a door in the first panel, and exit the scene out a door in the last. It’s a very specific constraint that still leaves a lot to the individual artist’s imagination, and gives the editor something to work with to piece everything together into a vaguely “coherent” storyline.

But make no mistake — this book isn’t about a coherent storyline. It’s about seeing Mickey Mouse drawn by all of these wonderful artists in ways you’ve likely never seen before. The artists get to draw Mickey in their own style, not Floyd Gottfredson’s, or the current Disney Style Guide.

Most of the pages are four tiers of panels. Some go with a very strict grid pattern, while others vary the number of panels in each tier. A few even limit themselves to three tiers.

It’s amazing how much extra story you can get into a page with that extra fourth tier, though. To my eye, all the best and most satisfying pages are the ones with the four tiers.

There are a few repeated themes/techniques on display in the book. Let me break a few of them down:

Large Mickey

The cover is based in a page near the end of the book by Paco Rodriguez, where a giant Mickey hand is coming out of the door in the upper left while his foot is going into the door at the bottom right. He’s surrounded by his cast of supporting characters, half of whom provide jokes about Mickey’s suddenly large size.

It’s a strong visual, though the attempts to tie it together into a solid story arc are weak, and a little on the nose.

I’m only showing half the page here because, well, you should really buy the book to read everything.

The page after that by Sascha Wustefeld shows Mickey expanding into taller panels in the middle tier of the page as he emerges from the door, and then how he manages to get out in the last tier. It’s another well-designed bit of storytelling, using the medium as the plot. It’s wordless, easy to follow, and not super obvious.

Olivier Supiot draws a giant lizard/dragon as the full page image, with Mickey walking from corner to corner in the curved way that the lizard’s body goes. So not only does this page give you the single image element across the page, but it also gets the reading order changed in an easy-to-follow way.

Painted Mickey

Most of the artists go with straight line art and some variety of coloring styles, whether that’s flat solid colors, or slightly textured colors with some extra gradients or shadows.

A few went to watercolor or more.

Dav (dav_le_dessineux on Instagram) paints his backgrounds, while Mickey in the foreground is more traditional black line art and solid coloring, albeit with some volumetric shadow work.

I always enjoy Dav’s art, but doubly so here, where the trick is that Mickey sees his friends in the forest, but each time it turns out to be a natural feature. His reflection in the water and a well-placed butterfly looking like a bow creates Minnie Mouse. Goofy is a log in the water and a couple of bushes.

It’s a great use of the visual medium of comics. You need to see the images to get what’s going on, not just read the dialogue balloons.

Silvio Camboni starts with black and white line art, but it looks to me like he’s water-painted the entire page. His page is very detailed, with another visual story centering on a man-eating plant and a very vibrant and lush patch of environment to help show off Camboni’s skills.

He’s done a couple of steampunk Mickey Mouse albums in France that are absolutely gorgeous. I seriously hope Fantagraphics looks into those for publication next. I think their level of detail and the painted look would set the book apart from all the other Disney reprint titles, in a very good way.

Old School Mickey

While most of the creators in this book are not your typical Disney career artist, there are a few exceptions.

My favorite Mickey artist is Cesar Ferioli. I fell in love with his work twenty years ago during the Gemstone run on the Disney license. There’s something that’s perfect about his art style for Mickey Mouse. The lines are always round enough. The proportions are cute. The energy and body language is great on the page. I love the way he draws Mickey’s hands.

So it’s not surprising that his art looks great in this book, as well. It’s a cute story, with Mickey in his house, attacked by the Phantom Blot from the shadows, and then escaping.

You don’t get much Older School for Mickey than Marco Rota! He’s been drawing Disney comics for longer than I’ve been alive. It was a real thrill to see him in this book, alongside a lot of younger artists.

His is a short love story between Mickey and Minnie. Rota uses a strict grid, but rearranges the reading order of them to accommodate the story, in which the two mice ride a Ferris wheel on a clockwise ride.

It’s also one of the cases in the book where if you look carefully, you can see the pencil marks and the brush strokes. It’s such a classic style and being able to see more into the process by studying the art is a lot of fun.

On the downside, the computer lettering really jumps off the page. It’s so much blacker than the ink lines, which you see in this panel. That “90!” in the panel above is hand-lettered on the board. Mickey’s dialogue is added in Illustrator later and it pops too much in comparison.

Now I’m REALLY nit-picking, though…

One last example:

Arnaud Poitevin and Joris Chamblain are not Disney artists, but they certainly look the part with their contribution.

They went for a very cool retro newspaper strip vibe with lots of DuoTone dot patterns and sepia tone coloring, of course. It’s a nice look, with a well-told story.

Out of Order Mickey (a/k/a “Imbattable Mickey”)

These are the one-pagers that feel like something out of “Mr. Invincible.” Most make the panel reading order obvious if you just follow the action. They break the bottom panel border at the end of a tier to lead your eye down, for example.

We start with the German artist, Flix, who you might remember from the excellent “Spirou in Berlin” album. His trademark ink line is back here, drawing Mickey Mouse traveling through a haunted house, complete with ghosts, mummies, an octopus, a shark, and books with teeth.

The trick, though, is that he keeps the readers distant, and locks down the camera as Mickey travels through what is essentially a cutaway view of the house. The action moves left to right, then down, right-to-left, down twice, right, up, right twice, diagonally down and to the left, and finally right to the finish.

It’s the Konami Code of storytelling.

The thing that puts the cherry on top of this dessert is his final inversion of the traditional reading order. Mickey walks downstairs behind a wall, traveling diagonally down and to the left. It works, which seems crazy. He helps it a little bit with motion lines, but it’s still pretty fancy storytelling.

The second story in this style is much later in the book, by Nicolas Juncker. This is a story that will hurt your brain.

Flix kept the background for the entire page static and guided your eye through it by following Mickey. Juncker does more traditional storytelling when it works for him, but then has characters fall through panels in ways that you see but aren’t meant to finish reading until you finish all the intervening panels first.

It’s really hard to describe and it’s a bit of a mind warp, but I like it. It helps that his Mickey and Peg Leg Pete are also cute in their off-model way.

Ultra-Stylistic Mickey

I love Florence Cestac’s work. I love her style. I’m not entirely sure it works here, though, I’m sorry to say.

She gives it a try, but there’s a tension between her style and Mickey’s form that never resolves itself for me. On paper, it should work: Cestac is the ultimate Big Nose artist, and Mickey has a big nose. But for some reason, this page didn’t do much for me.

On the other hand, I can’t recommend “The Midlife Crisis” or “The Late Life Crisis” strongly enough. Go read one of those.

Others Worth Noting

I could go on and on, and I’d still miss everyone I’d love to talk about. But I can’t end this review without a few more samples:

Pipeline favorite, Jose Luis Munuera (of “The Campbells” and “Spellbound” fame), gets a fun page with Mickey and Minnie taking on a dragon. It’s a completely silent page except for the sound effects which play a big part in the story. It’s great to see a comic use the visual nature of the medium to its advantage, and even cuter when it’s using something unique to the medium, itself.

Plus, Munuera’s Mickey and Minnie are just plain cute.

I’m not familiar with Eric Herenguel’s work, but I like what I see here. His Mickey starts with the classic design, but incorporates flourishes from Herenguel’s own style that I can appreciate. I’m not sure how else to describe it, other than that he adds just a little something to the standard style to make himself stand out while still feeling on model. It’s a neat trick, and his story is a good one for those familiar with Mickey’s history on screen.

Johan Pilet and Nicolas Pothier create a page with Mickey Mouse as an ace rocket ship pilot. It’s done in a retro four-color printing press way, complete with the dots in the art that the color presses would inevitably leave behind.

I also like that the villains in the piece are a traditional Duck villain, the Beagle Boys.

Dab is another creator I’m not familiar with, but his page with Mickey against a white background doing the most simple motion of pulling on a lever is a lot of fun. It’s not much of a story but I like his style and storytelling.

Price and Format

The book runs 52 pages total, 44 of which are story.

And, yes, this is an actual print book. It’s a hardcover and at the original album size of 8 1/2″ by 12 1/2″ inches.

The paper is white, but not glossy. You won’t get reflections from light sources in the room while you read it. The art comes across beautifully. It’s bright and clear. The colors aren’t being washed out when they’re soaked up by the paper, and some of the pages in this book are very detailed with the coloring. Look at Silvio Camboni or Alexis Nesme’s contributions, for two examples of this.

It’s the prototypical example of everything I’d love to see come to dominate the North American market.

It’s $14.99, which I think is perfectly reasonable. I know many will disagree and argue for smaller trade paperbacks for the same price. ($15.99 gets you five issues from Marvel these days.)

I want quality, though, not quantity. $15 for work at this size and this print quality is worth the premium to pay.

One very nice thing about the book is that the artist(s) is always credited at the bottom of the page. This is one of my biggest gripes about anthology books. With so many anthologies, I’ve been forced to flip back and forth to the table of contents to see whose work I was looking at. Worse, some of those anthologies didn’t include page numbers, so there was never an easy way to know where I was in the book, except relative to a known artist. Or, even better, the table of contents lists the page numbers, but the page numbers aren’t on the pages. That’s just frustrating.

Putting an artist’s name at the bottom of their contribution is just a smart idea.

At the end of the book, every creator also gets a paragraph for their bio with some credits included. It’s a nice touch.

On the Nature of Anthologies

You know the drill — anthologies are always a mixed bag. Some contributions are great, some are a waste of page space, etc. etc.

That being said, the great pages far outweigh the bad ones. I don’t regret buying this book for a minute. I had a ton of fun looking back through it countless times in putting this review together. Even processing the images was fun, because I saw more fun things as I went alone, such as Rota’s pencil and eraser marks.

Recommended?

Yes, absolutely. “Mickey All-Stars” features an all-star cast of amazing European cartoonists in one book. It’s beautiful. At only $14.99, it’s also very affordable. I wish more publishers would use this format for their European translations.

Buy It Now

• Amazon (print)
• Amazon/Comixology (digital)

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