Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil by Nicolas Pothier & Johan Pilet

I am no expert on Euro Disney comics. Fantagraphics has been reprinting what they say are the best of that large universe - and I have no reason to doubt them; publishing programs always try to get the best of whatever - for a decade or more, and I've dipped into that sequence here and there.

So I know enough to say that the Disney Euro universe is not unlike a kid-friendly version of a Big Two superhero universe, especially if you keep the dream/hoax/imaginary story stream in mind as well. They're generally about some permutation of the characters Disney fans call The Fab Five: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto. (Poor Daisy! Only room for one girl in that sausage-fest.) The villains are also always the same, just as you can be sure a year of Batman comics will have the Joker turning up at least once.

But they can be set "now" - in Duckburg (like Donald's Happiest Adventures) or Mouseton (like Trapped in the Shadow Dimension), or trotting the globe - or in some strange world (like Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean). Or in what seems to be the Marvel 2099 equivalent - a future world of 2128 and the fabulous city of New Mouseton!

That's the setting for Mickey Mouse Versus the Mouseton Society of Evil - the SoE doesn't have "New" in their name to modify Mouseton, possibly because they are the first SoE formed in any Mouseton, possibly due to translation glitches, possibly because no one thought it was important. (The original French name of the fiendish team seems to be "L'Alliance Malefique," which I like much better, but I'm just the kind of person who would.)

Anyway, this book is by Belgian creators Nicolas Pothier (writing) and Johan Pilet (art), and it features The Revenant Blot (future version of The Phantom Blot) getting himself sent to the fabulous space-jail of @lc@trz to break out a bunch of other villains, similarly future-versions of the Beagle Boys and so on. They form the title society, and have a wicked plan to...wreak havoc with giant robot crabs, and then use one member's mind-influencing power to take over the feed in everyone's "Egophone," influence the public to love them all, and then, eventually, run for office and seize political power!

(It seems that giant robot crabs might not be entirely necessary for a plot like that - it sounds like the kind of thing that could be done entirely within the law, which would leave Space Ranger Mickey no reason to come beat them up - but if they did things the smart, sensible way I suppose they wouldn't be villains, would they?)

But that is their plan, and they insist that it requires a giant robot crab, and, like all fiendish plans hatched by secret societies of multiple villains, it works pretty well for a while. But Mickey gathers his friends - you know them; I mentioned them in Paragraph One - and, despite a few setbacks and a long unexpected space journey, they are victorious in the end.

Either Pothier or his translator (David Gerstein) has some fun language Easter Eggs, particularly in the overwrought villain dialogue. The bank robbed in the early pages of the book is also named Zeerust, a deep cut I particularly appreciated. This is a book explicitly OK for kids, but has that old Looney Tunes or Jay Ward-style mix of high and low-culture jokes to keep the parents from being bored, too.

Pilet has an energetic, distinctive art style - he gives Mickey a beetle brow to make him look more serious - and gives his coloring the vague sense of being made up of Ben-Day dots. It all gestures in the direction of classic mid-century Disney comics while not specifically copying any of them.

This is a book made to be accessible for kids, part of a giant hegemonic global entertainment corporation looking to maximize the return on its long-running IP. Within that context, it's a fun adventure story.