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After a long hiatus, the Disney’s Magic Makers series is back! We return with a look at the Comic Strip side of the Studios. This week, we’ll focus on Floyd Gottfredson.

Floyd Gottfredson was born in 1905 in Kaysville, Utah (in a railroad station where his parents lived). His father would regularly take him on hunting trips. After one of these trips left him severely injured, Gottfredson took up cartooning through correspondance courses.

By the 1920s, he was drawing comic strips for several Utah newspapers while also working for a small movie theater chain as a projectionist and advertising artist. After winning several awards for his cartoons, Gottfredson moved to southern California in hopes of breaking into the newspaper industry, but couldn’t find a job and ended up working at another theater as a projectionist. When the theater was torn down a year later, Gottfredson found himself out of a job until he heard about a potential opening at the Walt Disney Studios.

In 1929, he was hired by Walt to work as an in-between to help with the “Silly Symphony” shorts. When Ub Iwerks and Win Smith left the Studios, they left no one in charge of the “Mickey Mouse” daily/Sunday comic strips. Walt, knowing Gottfredson’s knack for comics, asked him to take over temporarily until it was permanently filled. Gottfredson held this position from 1930 until 1975.

After a few months of inking the “Mickey Mouse” strip, Gottfredson was promoted to head of the Walt Disney Comic Strip Department. Under him, the department grew to include the “Mickey Mouse” daily and Sunday strips, the “Donald Duck” daily and Sunday strips, and the “Silly Symphony” Sunday strip. A few years into the strip, he started to pull back and let others ink the strips while he penciled them so that he could oversee the department better.

He introduced a number of well-known Disney characters in his “Mickey Mouse” strips such as Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse (Mickey’s nephews), Eli Squinch, Sylvester Shyster, Captain Doberman and Gloomy, and The Phantom Blot.

Floyd Gottfredson died July 22, 1986, was named a Disney Legend in 2003, and was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.

Here is an example of one of his earliest strips while you can find one of Gottfredson’s later strips here.