Told ya you wouldn't guess.
Also known as W MM 113-02 to the alien tome of eldritch lore that is the INDUCKS database, The Case of the Sinister Robot is a 1967 story from Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse #113, reprinted in #202 of the same. History has forgotten the name of its writer, as it often does when that writer wasn't someone people care about (like Carl Barks) or someone too blinkin' weird to ever be confused with anyone else (like Vic Lockman).
The story is extremely obscure, as are most 1960's Mickey Mouse stories, especially those not drawn by Paul Murry, which is extremely unfair; nothing against Murry, individually, but Strobl here does just as good in his own style. I stumbled upon it (get used to that phrase, I “stumbled upon” most of the stuff I'm going to be reviewing here) quite recently and found it quite delightful. It's very 1960's, very goofy, but also a compelling sci-fi story in its own right.
The best way I can describe it is, its plot is a house of cards standing on a table of clichés, but heck, are the cards pretty.
The introduction sets up a nice and looney mystery as Mouseton is wracked by all mechanical devices going nuts.
This culminates in gravity itself failing, and Mickey, Goofy and Chief O'Hara wading to the Mayor's office like astronauts in space. (Most puzzling is the Chief's line that he thought Mickey might know what's going on — Mickey solves the crazy occurrences, but he's rarely behind them…)
The Mayor himself is not characterized very strongly — but then, he never is — the most you can say about the Mayor of Mouseton as a character is that he was a pink elephant for some reason in a couple of 1980's stories. Duckburg's Pig-Mayor, he is not. But while the Mayor himself is just a random mustached dognose, we do get a very amusing picture of the scientists and authorities he has gathered to solve the problem, where both the unknown writer's dialogue, and Strobl's art, really shine.
Who would dare to look at that panel and call Strobl a "mediocre cartoonist" (which seems to be everyone's unspoken opinion of him, if they have one at all)? Props, also, to the coloring department. Not always the most competent lot at the time, and they do inexplicably dye Chief O'Hara's hair brown here, but the choice of colors for the costumes of the scientist flows very well, and the reddish-brown mustache for Mustache Guy in the middle is perfect.
I mentioned Unknown Writer earlier, and again, what a shame it is that we don't know who that guy was. This story's premise is amusing enough, but it's the execution that makes it shine: "machines going backwards" could be played by-the-book with no particular punch, but the fast pacing allows it to really hit its mark. I did not expect to laugh out loud at an American, 1960's Mickey Mouse comic book, but Unknown Writer proved me wrong.
And at the same time, he develops a good mystery. It begins with not-Doctor-Syclocks here, mysteriously unaffected by the anti-gravity ray, who manages to shake off Mickey and the police…
…features the input of Shamrock Bones (a character who was funnier in theory than in practice, I often find, but here he doesn't overstay his welcome)…
(I dig the orange-and-green colors cheme for his checkered suit. Much more memorable than the usual Sherlock-Holme-brown. Also, notice: "peformed" instead of "performed". It's a credit to Disney comics that this is the only time I ever saw a blatant typo in a Disney speech balloon.)
…and leads our heroes to the Mouseton City Dump, where the sci-fi portion of the story begins in earnest as a mysterious energy being absorbs surrounding junk and builds itself a robot body out of it.
(…) 
The glowing-ball-of-energy form is cool, and never really explained; as for Kettlehead the Robot itself, it looks very distinctive, as do all the other robots in the story.
After another rather cool bit where the entrance to the villain's typically 1960's, stainless-steel underground lair is inside a wrecked old car, Mickey and Goofy begin to look for the mad scientist behind the whole scheme, and finds that there isn't one. Instead, our antagonist is a robot himself, bearing the delightfully nonsensical name of “X - Y + 2”. Wounded in his honor after he was retired due to his computational system being faulty, X-Minus has turned his genius to the task of repurposing all human technology, driving all of mankind to madness. He then plans to take over.
X-Minus is not actually the most interestingly-designed robot in the lair — it's telling that the cover for the story features his minion “0 = 4X”, and not himself — but he's very well-characterised. He's both clearly an insane robot, and a character rather than a mere bogeyman.
(You have to admire how 0 = 4X is entirely about to disintegrate them, then Mickey says "you can't! that's murder!", and the robots just… opine and desist from any murderous intent. It's funny for how unexpected it is, and on top of that, it actually makes sense if you stop and ponder it. After all, we all know the Three Laws of Robotics ought to prevent our antagonistic androids from actually planning to destroy anyone — and we know that X-Minus is broken — so I propose that it seemed like a right plan to him because it genuinely did not register for him that disintegrating people was murder until Mickey pointed it out; at which point he remembered his programming and thought of something else.)
I won't spoil it here, but the reveal of the Mysterious Not-Doctor-Syclocks from earlier is also very clever and creative, and something I don't think I've ever seen done with another fictional robot, so points for that. The final fate of X-Minus is also not bad, though the denouement in general feels a bit rushed.
Oh, one also has to love X-Minus's "last words" before he's powered down:
(Said every ‘Doctor Who’ villain ever. Or they should)
And there you have it.
The Case of the Sinister Robot seriously has all the qualities of the classic Gottfredson, Scarpa or Casty formula for a Mickey story: wacky goings-on - compelling mystery - interesting sci-fi concept behind it - snappy humor. Seriously, find a used copy or something, and give the thing a read.
I don't care what preconceptions you may have about a 1967, Tony Strobl-drawn Mickey Mouse story. Read it. I promise you won't regret it.
A very good review, indeed! I hadn't read this story before, but I might track it down now - it looks rather good, and I've always enjoyed Tony Strobl's art.
ReplyDeleteGreat work, and yes… I would never have guessed you would begin with one like this!
ReplyDeleteThis was one of a handful of issues of Gold Key’s MICKEY MOUSE title that I missed in my childhood. And, back in the 1960s, certainly in the New York suburb in which I lived, when you missed a comic book – it was GONE! Presumably forever!
I first read “The Case of the Sinister Robot” as a back issue comic-con purchase somewhere about 1984-85. Odd digression: I read it in its TOP COMICS version, before getting the Standard Gold Key Version some years later!
The reason I mention this is because it would mean that first read “The Case of the Sinister Robot” as ADULT, and was impressed by it! And said “impression” not being the product of childhood eyes, would make it all the more so!
If I had to guess, my pick for the alas-anonymous writer would be Cecil Beard (perhaps with his wife Alpine Harper). Bob Ogle would be my second choice. Far too little is known about either Beard or Ogle, but Beard seems to be the writer who moved Mickey out of Carl Fallberg’s standard detective, western, or seafaring adventures – and solidly into more imaginative sci-fi oriented stories, like this one.
Beard’s possible authorship of this tale is bolstered by the views expressed in this blog post!
As for Tony Strobl, I’ll never understand why he is so underappreciated! Sure, his later ‘70s and ‘80s art was of a lesser quality. Whose wasn’t, if they we practicing in the ‘40s and ‘50s?
To me, Strobl is one of the “Fab Five” of 1960s Western Publishing, along with Carl Barks, Harvey Eisenberg, Paul Murry, and Phil De Lara (the latter another tragically underrated talent)! Strobl drew a very wide variety of characters for the Dell and Gold Key comics, and all of them were clean, crisp, and on-model.
Strobl produced some incredible stuff over the years, as I noted HERE!
His work on Gold Key’s THE JETSONS comic clearly influenced his robot designs here!
Finally, compare Beard(?) and Strobl’s great panel of the arguing authority figures with Casty’s (and my, in the American English version) scene of the bickering UN delegates in “The Terrifying World of Tutor”. Though this is a more compressed version of Casty’s, you might find more similarities than you bargained for!
On the topic of Strobl's bad reputation, it is my long-held belief that Strobl's pencils were poorly served on his Duck stories by the stiff, often very stiff inking of Steve Steere. And the thing is, Strobl's oft-Steere-inked Barks pastiches are what modern readers are most likely to check out first.
DeleteThanks for your expertise on the matter of the writer! And yes, there are some similarity with the “Tutor” scene — not that these are the only two Disney comics to use that kind of trope; pretty sure Barks himself did too on several occasions. The Jippes-drawn, "bottled" HDL/Magica story jumps to mind.