Disney Studio Pt. 8 - 1930s Publicity Drawings for Silly Symphonies

For those of you who might wonder what Disney publicity art has to do with comic books, I will provide a little background material. The Disney studio produced publicity art from the outset -- first for movie/cartoon posters and merchandising purposes, and later more systematically in order to promote their films to the maximum (long before cross-merchandising began for feature films, as we see today). Beginning in very eary 1934, Disney had a publicity department which included a major talent, Tom Wood. For each short cartoon, Wood would draw, first in pencil and later in ink, one vertical image to be used primarily for a poster, six (and, rarely, 12) horizontal drawings to be used for still photographs for display in theater lobbies, plus additional images for books and other related products. A few months later, he was doing five drawings a month (which were then re-created by him in watercolor) for use in a Disney children's page in Good Housekeeping Magazine. Drawings such as these were produced until the early 1940s. Apparently Wood continued to work until his death in October 1940, but he was joined earlier by other artists in producing Disney publicity art -- in about 1936, by Manuel Gonzalez, the artist who would take over the Mickey Mouse Sunday pages from Floyd Gottfredson, and in about 1937 by Hank Porter. With so many images already in existence for specific publicity purposes, I guess it is not surprising that these images were also used (either by direct reproduction from the still photographs or by cheesy copies by third rate Whitman staff artists) for many covers and interior illustrations in Mickey Mouse Magazine (which was coming out at almost precisely the same time as the images were being drawn) and, a little later, in Walt Disney Comics and Stories. In fact, many, if not most, of the back covers of Mickey Mouse Magazines have a full-page image of the movie posters (based on these drawings) for the cartoons which would be coming out at the same times as the MMMs hit the stands. So that's what these drawings have to do with comic books. But I would like them, regardless of their many uses in the past, since they are some of the best pieces of art ever produced by the Walt DIsney Studio.