Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies 1932-1935: Starring Bucky Bug and Donald Duck

Product Description

The wild adventures of the first Disney star created just for comics―and Donald Duck’s hilarious funny-page debut!

1932 saw the launch of Disney’s second-ever original comic strip, the full-color weekly Silly Symphonies, and with it came the debut of Bucky Bug, a daring, rhyming, mischievous squirt whose escapades took him from brutal birds of prey to the terrifying trenches of the Great Flyburg War! With his brave lady friend June and bumpkin pal Bo, Bucky even travels to a mixed-up Mother Goose Land… where a not-so-merry Old King Cole has mayhem on his mind! 

Now in this latest stand alone Disney reprint collection, readers can follow all of Bucky’s adventures and the Symphonies Sunday sagas that followed, which also includes Donald Duck’s debut as the barnyard’s spoilt brat in “The Wise Little Hen”… and further tales of golden age Silly Symphony cartoon stars: egotistical Max Hare, slow-but-sure Toby Tortoise, and that awful bandit Dirty Bill (who “never took a bath, and he never will!”).

Included Stories

There are 16 stories included in the 192 pages of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies 1932-1935: Starring Bucky Bug and Donald Duck:

• Bucky Makes His Name
• The Quest For Fortune
• Adventures in Junkville
• Introducing Lucky Bucks
• Bugs in Love
• War with the Flies
• The Old Folk’s New Home
• In Mother Goose Land
• Return to Junkville
• Birds of a Feather
• Introducing Mickey Mouse Movies
• Penguin Isle
• The Wise Little Hen
• The Boarding-School Mystery
• Ambrose the Robber Kitten
• Cookieland

Review

This book series is another history lesson for me on early Disney comic strips. I have seen every Silly Symphony animated short, and I own them all on dvd from the Leonard Martin Disney Treasures series. I had never had the pleasure of being introduced to the character which stars in the first Silly Symphony comic strip, Bucky Bug. We get to know Bucky from the day he was born and through war and many of his life adventures. I didn’t want the Bucky stories to end, and reading these stories made me wish that he would have gotten a Silly Symphony short so that more Disney fans could know about him and his June Bug. Bucky has a Mickey personality and is definitely the Oswald Rabbit of early Disney comic strips. Like Oswald, I wish there was more Bucky content.

After doing more research, Bucky has also appeared in some Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories issues. There is even a Bucky story from Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories included as a bonus at the back of this volume.

The comic strip adaption of the Wise Little Hen treats us to the first comic strip appearance of Donald Duck…with yellow feathers. This comic strip story expands on the many different attempts that Donald Duck and Peter Pig try to get things from the Hen without offering to help. Disney Duck fans need to own this milestone comic strip.

The majority of the stories in this comic strip also expand on their Silly Symphony animated shorts or are an original tale. I was definitely inspired to watch some Silly Symphony cartoons after reading this volume. I wish Disney+ would add them to the library.

A big thank you to Fantagraphics for allowing us to start our journey through the classic Silly Symphonies comic strips. I look forward to future volumes. IDW had previously printed the Silly Symphony comic strips (1932-1945) into a four volumes collection.

Order: Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies 1932-1935: Starring Bucky Bug and Donald Duck

A second volume of the Silly Symphony comic strip has already been announced for later this year.

Order: Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies 1935-1939: Starring Donald Duck and the Big Bad Wolf

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