Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension by Andrea "Casty" Castellan

If you read comics at all, you probably know there's a whole mythology around Donald Duck and his Uncle Scrooge - maybe even if you don't read comics, but are old enough to have seen DuckTales and the related TV shows. You need to be somewhat deeper into either Eurocomics, history, or Disney fandom to know there's a similarly-sized mythology around Mickey Mouse himself, starting with the work of the American cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson in the 1930s and expanded a lot since then mostly by the European licensors of Disney characters for their own ongoing comics.

For example, there's an Italian comics publication - started in 1932; weekly since 1960 - called Topolino, featuring Mickey. Now, I'm sure there have been plenty of reprints and re-runs over the course of the last nearly hundred years - Disney is a smart enough organization to know that the kid audience completely regenerates itself once or twice a decade - but that's still at least tens of thousands of pages of comics.

Fantagraphics has been translating and republishing that work for the past couple of decades, building on the work of earlier publishers in first publicizing and rediscovering Gottfredson and the "Good Duck artist" Carl Barks starting in the 1970s. The Fanta series, which explicitly aims to reprint great EuroDisney comics, is called "Disney Masters," and it looks like they've had twenty-three volumes so far, most of them entirely separate stories by different creators from different nations, and spanning both the Mickey and Donald universes (which are not always entirely separate, but usually are at least distinct).

I'm no expert in this. I read piles of Duck comics as a kid in the 1970s at my grandparents' house in Utica, New York, and saw a bunch of DuckTales in college, but Mickey's mostly been the corporate icon to me, not an actual character in adventure stories. But I intermittently want to check out new frontiers of the comics world, so I checked out Mickey Mouse: Trapped in the Shadow Dimension, which collects three multi-part stories from the acclaimed Italian creator Andrea "Casty" Castellan, originally published in Topolino a little over a decade ago and translated by an unnamed person for this 2022 US collection.

I don't know if modern EuroDisney comics are entirely obsessed with their history and continuity, as US superhero comics are, or if it's just that the famous, best-loved stories are the ones that bring back famous characters and do new things with them (a la Batman: Hush, to give a US equivalent). But the three stories here are all in that mode: every big character is someone I learn was created decades ago by someone else, and the joy lies in seeing them brought back out of the toybox to play again.

The title story leads off, with Dr. Einmug (the usual genius scientist, created by Gottfredson) in the background and his creation Atomo Bleep-Bleep (a humanoid enlarged atom, so the narrative says) coming back to join Mickey in investigating the mysterious masked Mr. Benevolence, who has been giving away piles of gold bars to make various problems in Mouseton better. Mickey is suspicious, of course, and it does turn out there is a fiendish plot, with missing scientists, a parallel dimension, and a world-dominating plot by Pegleg Pete to be unraveled and foiled.

In the middle is "Uncle $crooge in The Terrible, Triple-Dimensional Beagle Boy," which is one of the traditional "Gyro Gearloose invents A Thing, Scrooge tries to make a fortune on it, and then The Bad Guys take advantage" plots. This time, Gyro makes a super-duper 3D printer, along with an extensive network of pipes to feed it, and Scrooge sells it to all of Duckburg for all of their needs. The reader thinks there will be some interesting satire of capitalism, as everyone in Duckburg stops buying everything but "gyro-gel" for their printers, but that's not the way the story goes. Instead, to get this scheme approved, Scrooge has to promise to make a gigantic statue of the Mayor, and the Beagle Boys hijack the 3D printing of that statue, turn it into a giant Beagle robot, and rob Scrooge's money bin. But Scrooge and Gyro do use the same invention to beat the Beagles in the end.

Last is "Mickey Mouse and the World to Come," which oddly seems like someone saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (and maybe a few other things like The Iron Giant) and decided that should be a Mickey Mouse story. There are four giant robots, another old super-science character as a Mickey sidekick (Eega Beeva), the standard vaguely-European small country ruled by a king who has been duped by the villains, and a world-dominating plan from another old villain, The Rhyming Man. Minnie is a character, but mostly just gets to be kidnapped and be vaguely plucky; she doesn't save anyone, even herself. Our heroes do of course win out in the end against the king's evil nephew and the (supposedly sinister, but I found deeply silly) Rhyming Man.

These are fun adventure stories pitched at kid level. Castellan does a solid job in this style, keeping the action moving and getting in some amusing dialogue. It's fairly light and always kid-appropriate, plus, of course, Disney-sanitized, but it's entirely copacetic for a harmless collection of kid comics stories.