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Original 1953 Disney Mickey Mouse Weekly True-Life Adventure Comic Art. Original finished pen-and-ink publication artwork prepared as a “True-Life Adventure” center spread for the August 8, 1953 issue of the British Disney-licensed comic Mickey Mouse Weekly. Unsigned, but almost certainly British illustrator Basil Reynolds. The artwork presents a miniature natural world associated with Walt Disney’s Academy Award-winning doc-short Nature’s Half Acre. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll hear the words coming off the page. Black ink on original production board, applied caption and correction slips, pencil layout marks, and handwritten editorial. Notes identify the intended August 8 issue, “True-Life Adventure” heading, center-spread placement. “1 Print only” and “One ghost please”; center spread refers to the comic spanning the full 2 interior pages of a comic book, “1 Print only” and “One ghost please” direct the photo studio to produce a single reduced bromide copy of the finished black-and-white artwork. The “ghost, ” was mounted and hand-colored to serve as a detailed color guide for the craftsmen at Odhams’ photogravure works. Blue-pencil 10? -inch notation records the intended reduced production width. This board measures approximately 16 3/8″ by 10″. Detailed panels follow honeybees, a spider, mud dauber wasp, sundew, praying mantis and chameleon. Transcription of the comic text appears at the end of this listing. Clear and undamaged original artwork with strong, sharply defined black ink; heavier inked areas retain some surface sheen. Light, even age toning with no observed foxing, no sunbleaching. Original blue, green, and graphite production marks remain in the margins. Applied caption and correction slips are visible with backlighting. Original studio docket remains adhered to the reverse. Mickey Mouse Weekly was a British Disney-licensed illustrated newspaper published by Odhams Press from 1936 through 1957. Alongside imported Disney material, it employed British artists to produce original features. Basil Reynolds worked on its illustrated True-Life Adventures pages, adapting subjects associated with Disney’s theatrical nature documentaries. This center spread was prepared for the August 8, 1953 issue and relates to Nature’s Half Acre, released theatrically in 1951 and awarded the Academy Award for Best Short Subject. This is completed camera-ready comic artwork, not a storyboard. The pasted captions, correction overlays, reproduction dimensions, editorial annotations, and reverse studio docket document its passage through the period publishing process. When summer comes to Nature’s Half Acre, all the activity begun in spring continues unceasingly… For instance, the honeybee, who is a smaller cousin of the bumblebee, gets on with her important job of gathering nectar and pollen for the bee colony… To the bee, pollen is the staff of life… She combs it into little balls which she attaches to her legs. Whenever a bee discovers a new supply of pollen, she… Hurries home to tell the others. It’s an amazing fact that she actually does communicate with her fellow workers through this strange little ritual… Known as the’pollen dance. The spider is also active… Waiting for any insect who may be foolish enough to get entangled in his beautifully constructed web! But if the spider wins one battle, he may lose the next… For his natural enemy is the mud dauber, a wasp that builds a curious mud chamber in which he entombs spiders… Spiders and unusual wasps are not the only traps awaiting the unwary… For in Nature’s Half Acre there are secret places where beauty itself is an invitation to disaster. Here may be found strange plant forms… The tentacles of the sundew, for instance, are tipped with nectar that attracts and holds fast any insect which strays too near! With luck, we shall also see that queer insect, the praying mantis… In the Orient he’s often kept as a household pet, for, in spite of his rather frightening appearance, he’s quite harmless. But here’s an even queerer inhabitant… The chameleon, who catches all his food with his long tongue. He can also change colour to match his surroundings, and, as his eyes work independently, he can look in two different directions at once!

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