This one - the title is the jaw-breaking Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean - popped out at me from its gorgeous art. (I thought it might be painted, but the book credits a colorist.) As with all of the books in this series, as far as I know, it reprints a big story from the European Disney publishing operations - this one seems to have been an original album from Éditions Glénat in France in 2018, translated into English (by Jonathan H. Gray) for a 2025 publication over here.
As usual with Euro Disney stuff, the creators are people I'm not familiar with - bande dessinée is a huge field, with hundreds of creators working in their specific niches, and only bits and pieces of that ever make their way across the Atlantic. It was written by Denis-Pierre Filippi, drawn by Silvio Camboni, and colored by Gaspard Yvan (assisted by Jessica Bodart - possibly just for touch-up or similar on this US edition).
It's a steampunky near-future setting - one major peg-legged character is named Steampunk Pete here, to underscore that - which has had some sort of minor or not entirely equally distributed apocalypse. There are, of course, large airships, as well as boats, some computer tech and just a bit of mysterious super-science. Our heroes - Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy - work as scavengers, searching out underwater wrecks from before the apocalypse and mostly retrieving their valuable corallite fuel. Their great rival is the already mentioned Steampunk Pete, who is at least a sharp-elbowed competitor given to jumping his rivals' claims, if not actually a pure villain here as he usually is.
One discovery leads inventor Goofy to improve a telepresence suit he's been working on, getting to the point where Mickey can pilot it to do jobs deep underwater. They use that to win a contest to salvage supposedly inaccessible treasure, which leads them to be hired by Dr. Einmug, the standard Disney super-scientist.
Einmug's team brings in Mickey's team to do a dive, supposedly to find and disable a superweapon from that old apocalypse. But, actually, Einmug was seeking a massive deposit of corallite on the ocean floor there, and planned to secretly have Steampunk Pete take over the telepresence suit to release a Polarity Inversion Gas - "an Einmug invention that causes water to lose its gravity!"
(Are you buying this? That is one of the goofiest macguffins I've ever seen, and I edited SFF for more than a decade.)
The gas works better than expected, turning all of the water on earth into floating, storm-wracked oceans in the sky. Meanwhile, Einmug's assistant Prof. Portis, who is the actual villain, pushed out his boss, took over what seems like the whole world using his new massive energy source, and creates an army of robo-drones to do his bidding.
Oh, and Mickey gets knocked out during the turmoil. He wakes up five years later after a chapter transition, to learn all of the above. Pete is now on their team - he's been loyal and helpful for the past five years - and they're almost ready to fight back against Portis, using an antidote to the gas that will put the oceans back on the ground where they belong. (I can't now find any reason why this group would be able to do that, but it's the story, so just go with it.)
Mickey and team sneak around, battle Portis's drones with their own tech, and send the telepresence suit on one last mission to the deepest depths of the sky-ocean, in a desperate bid to put the world back the way it was. Do they succeed? Well, it's a Disney story, which is a big hint.
The art is absolutely spectacular here. I think the print version is oversized - I read it digitally - and it's probably better read on those big pieces of paper. The story has a lot of "can you believe this happened?" and "no, really, this is how it works" elements that I didn't quite believe, and it's got a lurching rhythm - I think because Filippi organized his story into chapters and is trying to keep them distinct, like an old-time serial. On the other hand, any Mickey Mouse story requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief anyway, and Filippi does good character work here and keeps the goofy super-science explanations on this side of plausibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment