I'd Call it Fanfiction · 7:42pm January 12th
Randy Milholland, also known as R.K. Milholland:
Has been doing comics for a long time.
His webcomic Something*Positive, for instance, began at the end of 2001, and he's been updating it once a week, twice a week, sometimes three times a week or more ever since. I've never much cared for it as he gets a little too dark for me, but he's had a lot of success. He actually makes money with his webcomics, something I've never been able to figure out how to do, and two years ago, he got hired by King Features Syndicate to write and draw official, actual, brand-new Sunday Popeye comics. And now?
Now he's doing a Mickey Mouse comic.
Because—as I'm sure we're all aware by now—the original Mickey Mouse cartoon, "Steamboat Willie," entered the public domain at the first of the year. A quick Google search will likely show the interested reader announcements for a couple slasher films and other blood-n-guts versions of the earliest version of Mickey that are supposed to be upcoming, but Milholland? He's a genuine fan of old comics and cartoons. And taking "Steamboat Willie" as his starting point, he's drawing and writing a new comic detailing what happens to Mickey after he unleashes the anarchy we see in the course of that cartoon.
Mousetrapped is what he's calling the strip, and I'm quite enjoying it. It's got the feel of comics from the early 1930s—someone once said about Elsie Segar's Popeye comics that you could smell the cabbage soup while reading it, and that's definitely true of Mousetrapped. Milholland has said that he wants to do an adventure comic his daughter can read, but he's not interested in sugarcoating the Depression-era dynamics that underlie a lot of those early Mickey Mouse cartoons either. So I'm happily tagging along for the ride.
Mike
Going off on a tangent here inspired by your mention of the Popeye comic strip, which is carried in my local paper...
I recently came back from a vacation at Universal Studios in Orlando, and one of the parks has an area called Cartoon Lagoon that gives homage to comic strips over the ages. Like a few other areas of those parks, there really are no attractions, just shops and perhaps restaurants, but no rides. However, given that most of the park's patrons skew young, I wonder what appeal they think this place would have. I'm no spring chicken, and I do still see some of the strips they feature in the paper nowadays, but they're all very long-running ones (like Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey, and Blondie). Some I haven't seen in years, but for all I know do still run somewhere (like Snuffy Smith and Hi & Lois). And then there are even older ones. Gasoline Alley is from my grandfather's era, and I've never read it (I think I've seen continuations, not by the original author of course, in papers years ago), yet it warrants an entire themed storefront.
It just seemed odd to me. I respect an homage, but I don't know who this is appealing to. It does make sense that it's adjacent to the area that covers all the Marvel stuff (with numerous rides as well).
well, that's a little marvel :)
glad to see someone doing something actually creative with this public domain stuff for once :V
Oh wow, there's a webcomic I haven't thought about in almost a decade. I used to be a fervent reader of webcomics, with several dozen that I perused eagerly every day/week/month (depending on their update schedule). Then I hit a rough patch and went without Internet access for a long while, and that pretty much ended that. When I got Internet access back again--via my first smartphone--I jumped to reading straight up fanfiction; it was less data-intensive and easier to read on the screen than a page full of images like a webcomic. Started with Battletech--which in passing was also my first introduction to those ponies we all know, via The Thessalonica Legacy--then jumped into the deep well of Naruto fanfiction, then Harry Potter, and somewhere in passing ended up here as well.
Thanks for the heads-up! It looks like fun.
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The original:
Universal Studios is an hour or so north of me up in L.A., but I haven't been there in decades. If they had something like this, I'd definitely head up there to take a look!
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I did a story in the Writeoff:
Five or six years ago called "'Twas Brillig" that was all about one of the Oz characters discovering that they were in the public domain. I ended up selling it to the webzine Zooscape where folks can either read it for free on their website or buy the recently released print version. So I'm all for having fun in the public domain.
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I still read:
A couple dozen webcomics and do two of my own—Daily Grind and Terebinth, though Daily Grind is more a series of illustrated novellas these days than an actual comic...
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For some reason:
The computers at the library where I work won't open the Mousetrapped main page. I can use Google's image search to pull up the individual comics on the website, but the website itself "times out" every time I try to look at it. At home, though, I can get through just fine. I assume Disney's using gremlins to interfere with the internet somehow.
Mike
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I'm in a similar situation, where I used to follow a bunch of webcomics, but the problem for me is that most of them stopped for various reasons. Gronk, Atomic Laundromat, Cleopatra in Space!!! all RIP. A few others haven't updated in a year or more, like Scenes from a Multiverse, Brainchild, and Freefall. Some are really haphazard lately, like Beartato, Bug, Wondermark, and Romantically Apocalyptic. The only reliable ones are xkcd, Modern Mogal, and Phoebe and her Unicorn.
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Freefall?
You mean this one? With Sam the alien squid guy, Florence the anthropomorphic wolf, and Helix the little round robot? 'Cause it's been going steadily, three days a week, for decades now. And with Cleopatra in Space, the guy stopped doing it on the web when he sold it to Scholastic and did six graphic novels for them. He then sold the rights to DreamWorks and they made a 26 episode cartoon series out of it...
Mike
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Maybe Frefall is mislabeled? I'm not caught up on it, but if you go to the index page, the last year listed is 2021.
And I knew that about Cleopatra in Space, as I watched the show and reviewed it in my blog.
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That's just the weird formatting of the Index page on that site. the pages continue after that year. You may notice one of them labeled AprilFools2022, and the last page is today's. The main site is a bit of an antiquated mess, check out the speedreader instead.
Hm, looks like it might be interesting, and not too much of an archive to catch up on... I might give it a read. Thanks!
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He seems to have:
Really slowed down putting the strip out the past couple weeks, but, well, considering the history of webcomics in general, I'm just hoping he doesn't abandon the thing entirely...
Mike
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Ah, sorry. Hopefully things indeed go well.
(I did, indeed, read through the archive and start following the comic, by the way. :))