Publicity Drawing for Magician Mickey, February, 1937

This drawing was originally on a larger sheet of Disney's standard animaton paper, but, infortunately, a dealer must have cut it down so that it could pass for a storyboard drawing. For soe inexplicable reason, animation and storyboard drawings have historically sod for more money than the greatly superiorpublicity drawings (insofar as draftsmanship is concerned. Since I began collecting Disney pubicity art in c. 1978, the term "publicity" has had a pejorative meaning, perhaps because few dealers or collectors have a clue about the use of such drawings or the fabulous artists at Disney's studio who were selected to draw these great images. The classic publicity drawings made by Tom Wood, Manuel Gonzalez (who is almost never given credit for his work), and Hank Porter from 1934 until about 1940 are in an entirely different league to the huge amount of publicity art that came out of the Disney Studio in later years, but most people probably conflate the various forms of publicity art and disregard all of it. It seems that this dismissive attitude has begun to change lately (beginning c. 2016), as reflected by the much higher prices realized at auction for Disney publicity art from the 1930s -- IT'S ABOUT TIME!