Mighty Mouse flies out of the television and into real life…literally.
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Transcript:
Here he comes! It's time for Mighty Mouse: Saving the Day, Volume One.
Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
Dynamite Comics is a company I tend to associate with kind of hard-edged, noirish comics; stuff that tends to go pretty dark. I was surprised that they were trying to get into all ages comics and kind of surprised by one of the volumes that they did, and it really caught my eye. It's Mighty Mouse, Volume One: Saving the Day. It's a five-Issue mini-series written and with art by Sholly Fisch. The book focuses on Mighty Mouse from the classic cartoon era. Mighty Mouse began as Super Mouse, a parody of Superman, and then became kind of his own character with this yellow costume and the name of Mighty Mouse, and singing as he went into action.
When I was a kid Mighty Mouse was one of those characters that was kind of OK, but for the lead character in this book Mighty Mouse is much more than that. Joey gets picked on at school and the story shows that he goes through a lot of bullying. And he also comes home to an empty house as his mom has to go off to work, and so he sits at home watching Mighty Mouse cartoons and is daydreaming. He's enthralled and he's wishing that Mighty Mouse were here to deal with the villains, the bullies in his life. And so he draws a picture about Mighty Mouse being there, and so Mighty Mouse flies out of the TV screen. And eventually after some introductions Mighty Mouse flies out into town and they run across a mugger, and he's about to punch him with the super strength, and Joey stops him and says that if Mighty Mouse hits this mugger it will kill him, he will die. And Mighty Mouse is really taken aback by that because he comes from a cartoon world, and things happen in a cartoon way. And so he says, "Well, what if people fall off a cliff?" And Joey says, "They die! Get blown up? They die! Get run over by a steamroller? They die?" And Mighty Mouse delivers the best line in the comic; he says, "Your world is really terminal!"
But Mighty Mouse's heroics are detected so they have to get off the street, and not only that but the cartoon is going on without Mighty Mouse, and without Mighty Mouse in his world the villains are taking over, and Mighty Mouse needs to go back and save the day. But before that can happen Joey needs to get sleep and then get off to school, and the police actually show up because they are curious about this whole Mighty Mouse thing, and Joey had been seen at the scene. But they're able to bluff their way through it with a Mighty Mouse doll in the backpack along with Mighty Mouse. However, when the bully start pushing around Joey at school, Mighty Mouse comes out and saves the day, and he actually hits the bully and his neck does this really weird spiral thingy. And it's determined that cartoon physics do work in the real world, but only for Mighty Mouse.
When they get home from school they get back on to the whole getting Mighty Mouse home thing, and they get into a very long convoluted attempt to explain how Mighty Mouse got here; and they get into things like the fact that Mighty Mouse needs to save the day and Joey needed Mighty Mouse, but now Mighty Mouse needs to get back to his own world. And so Joey comes up with the solution to draw a portal that goes between the worlds. Unfortunately that allows the villains who happened to be invading Space Cats to come into our world and to unleash havoc on the city. And so the cats from outer space are opposed by Mighty Mouse but there are a lot of them that only wanted Mighty Mouse, and he gets close to being overwhelmed when Joey has the idea that since his drawing ...