themouseuniversecharacters

Although Barks did not have much contact with the mouse universe he did actually use 8 of its primary characters during his comic book career. Here is a small gallery of them all as drawn by Barks.

Mickey Mouse	Minnie Mouse

I liked Mickey for his purposes. He was good in adventure-strips. But the thought of having to draw something like this did not appeal to me. I enjoyed working with the duck because I could knock him around, have him get hurt - I could let him fall off cliffs. It was lots of fun with Donald. With Mickey it would have been kind of dangerous, because Mickey always had to be right. With the duck I had a comedian that I could treat badly and who I could make fun of.

Goofy	Clarabelle Cow

There was one I couldn't stand: it was Disney's Goofy. Goofy was simply a half-wit. I could never understand what was supposed to be funny about a half-wit.

Morty and Ferdie

During the 1950s the US postal service enforced a peculiar demand saying that comic magazines sent as second class mail were to contain a minimum of two stories and no characters were allowed to appear in both!
Because of this rule, the Uncle Scrooge story Land Beneath the Ground (U$13) in the American issue was reduced from 32 to 27 pages in order to make room for a 4-pager starring Gyro Gearloose fighting the elements during a rainstorm. But even that was not enough as Huey, Dewey and Louie starred in both stories. Thus Donald's nephews were replaced by Morty and Ferdy from the mouse universe.

Pluto

Pluto was in a lot of their comic-strips, but he was a very artificial dog, so different from any idea one might have of a dog. I never liked him very much. He was a dumb dog, you might say.

'Pluto Saves the Ship' (LCF7 from 1942 - Editor's remark) was written by Jack Hannah, Nick George, and I in 1942 in our evening hours. It was not an adaptation of a cartoon story. Eleanor Packer of Whitman Publishing may have dreamed up the basic plot. It was only a one-shot special designed to take advantage of the wartime jitters.

Black Pete

Black Pete is by far the longest continuously used Disney character starting in the cartoon Alice Solves The Puzzle from 1925. Later he was the perfect villain in many cartoons with Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and others.

Before the time of their joint comic book story FC0009 Pirate Gold, Hannah and Barks made a number of cartoons in which Pete was the usual bad guy playing against Donald Duck. Later, in his comic books, Barks used Black Pete in a handful of stories, but he usually gave him different names in order to blur his true identity.