Manuel Gonzales

Manuel Gonzales (March 3, 1913 – March 31, 1993)^[1] was a Spanish-American Disney comics artist. He worked on the Mickey Mouse comic strip from 1940 to 1981.^[2]

Gonzales was born in Cabañas de Sayago, Zamora, Spain and died in Los Angeles.

Biography

Gonzales emigrated from Spain to the USA in 1918 via

Later working in the comic strip department, Gonzales took over the illustrating of the Mickey Mouse comic strip's Sunday page from Floyd Gottfredson in 1938. Only interrupted by his military service for the USA in World War II from 1942 to 1945, Gonzales performed this job until his retirement in 1981. During the war, he worked for the U.S. Army as an artist animating short newsreel clips promoting war bonds and the war effort.

Beside the Sunday pages, Gonzales worked on other Disney comic strips and illustrations. He inked Donald Duck and Scamp dailies, illustrated newspaper comic adaptations of different Disney films, like Song of the South, and illustrated some Disney books. He also worked on Disney's annual Christmas comic strip from 1960 to 1969.^[3]

Gonzales grew up in Westfield, Massachusetts, where he went to school and picked tobacco during summer jobs as a boy. He later lived and went to art school in New York City. His father, walking home from work one late-summer evening in 1936, tore a flyer from a telephone pole and gave it to Gonzales after dinner. The flyer invited artists to bring their portfolios to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a job opportunity. Gonzales was interviewed and hired on the spot, given $200 and told to report in two weeks to the Hyperion Studios in Los Angeles to work as an animator. His first assignment was as an "in-betweener" on what was to be the first animated full-length major motion picture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for a man he'd never heard of before named Walt Disney.

Gonzales received a "