After what seems like a long long time, this past March Yen Press finally released Kingdom Hearts: The Novel as a single black & white collected manga. Just one that happens to be over 300 pages long! “On the Destiny Islands, three children–Sora, Riku, and Kairi–are living out their peaceful, carefree lives while yearning for whatever lies beyond the great ocean. But one night, an unexpected disaster takes place, and the three are torn from each other and their island home. Meanwhile, at Disney Castle, Donald Duck and the other castle residents are in an uproar upon discovering King Mickey has suddenly gone missing. When fate brings them together, Sora, Donald, and Goofy set out on a grand Disney adventure to find their friends!” Find it over at the Yen Press web site. It’s written by Tomoco Kanemaki and illustrated by Shiro Amano, based on the original game concept by Tetsuya Nomura.

image c. 2015 Yen Press

Jerry Beck’s Animation Scoop website noted on December 18 that the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry has announced its 2013 selection of twenty-five new additions. Several of the films are animated, or contain animated sequences, and among those, several feature anthropomorphized animals.

Treesong used to complain about zombie comic books a lot; he’d not be happy to see The Walking Dead #100 take the #1 spot on the December sales list. I guess Image was all like, “My Little Pony beat us as the number one non-Marvel-or-DC book last month? And they don’t even have a book out this month? Well, I guess we’ll just have to beat everybody instead!”

Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, the daily comic strip, was initially written by Walt Disney himself and illustrated by Ub Iwerks when the strip began in 1930. When those two men found themselves too busy with animation to handle the strip, Floyd Gottfredson took over as both writer and artist — from late 1930 until 1975! Now Fantagraphics Books have brought together a special collection of full-color Sunday strips created by Mr. Gottfredson and put them in a paperback book, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Color Sundays, Volume 1: Call of the Wild (*whew!*). Here’s the description from Westfield Comics: “Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse series makes the jump from black and white to vibrant color. Many of these classic Sunday strips from 1932-1935 have never before been reprinted and have been restored from Disney’s archives and enhanced with a meticulous recreation of the strips’ original color. Call of the Wild also brings you more than 30 pages of supplementary features such as rare behind-the-scenes art, vintage publicity material, and fascinating commentary by a prismatic pack of Disney scholars. This is a collection that fans have been seeking for a lifetime!” Edited by David Gerstein and Gary Groth, this softcover hardback collection hits the stores in May.

This is almost impossible to describe, even when you’re looking right at it! Check out this name: Chogokin Super-Combining King Robo Mickey and Friends. Then just check out the picture below! It’s a new toy created in Japan as a collaboration between Bandai Tamashii Nations and Disney. It features die-cast metal characters with names like Jet Mickey, Sky Minnie, Diver Donald, Aqua Daisy, Land Goofy, and Dash Pluto, who combine (along with other accessories) into the massive King Robot to fight… sheesh, we can only guess what! Take a look at the advertisement on Amazon to see more of what the individual component characters look like. King Robo Mickey (etc etc…) will be available internationally this April. Now all we have to do is wait for the TV series…

image c. 2013 Bandai Tamashii Nations and Disney

Disney Interactive’s Epic Mickey video game was pretty popular — it even won an Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Game. Admittedly, some folk complained about the fact it was only available for the Nintendo Wii system, but it sold well enough to be considered a moderate success in the gaming world. The follow up, Epic Mickey 2? Not so much, in spite of the fact that 2 was made available for many game platforms. Now comes the word (according to various articles) that sales of Epic Mickey 2 since its November 2012 launch were poor enough that Disney has decided to shutter Junction Point, the Texas-based game design firm that Disney purchased in 2007 to develop both the Epic Mickey games. From this point forward, Disney Interactive will instead focus their attention on Disney Infinity, the new figurine-based multi-character game (similar in some ways to Skylanders) which will premier in June.

image c. 2013 Disney Interactive

This game is a nostalgia trip. Much like the original Epic Mickey, it highlights a diverse cast of classic Disney characters that don’t always get the spotlight; sure, there’s a matchmaking questline that unites Donald and Daisy Duck as romantic partners, but there’s also one featuring Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. When was the last time you saw those two characters featured?

Well, probably the last Epic Mickey game; you also get that nostalgic kick just listening to the opening screen music if you’ve already played the first game. The world of the Epic Mickey, Wasteland, is a bizarre world of forgotten and buried cartoons; at one point, I found myself looking at a bizarre new form of sedimentary rock formed of discarded Disney paraphernalia. It’s a nice place to visit; I’m not sure if I want to live there, though. It’s strangely creepy.

And the camera still stinks, too.

SPOILER ALERT: I have tried to hide late game plot revelations as best I can, and believe I did an alright job. However, I totally spoil the ending of the first Saw movie after the break.
Update (Jan 29): Disney shutters Epic Mickey creator Junction Point Studios

This handheld spinoff of the Epic Mickey games features Mickey Mouse as Mario in an old-school side-scroller with cel-animation style visuals. What he’s doing in a 2D game with 2D visuals on a console with “3D” in its name is a mystery.

I’m sorry. That came out a bit grumpy. You see, I really liked this game. Up to a point. Then that point came and I was very disappointed in it. This made me re-examine the game a bit more harshly than I expected, but it all really is sour grapes.

Hot on the heels of the news of Disney partnering with luxury fashion clothes designers to create exclusive duds for attenuated versions of Mickey, Minnie, Daisy, Goofy, and other classic Disney characters, comes this news that Disney is also partnering with Japanese toymaker Bandai to smooch said classic Disney characters together into a single “Voltron-style” transforming giant robot – coming in March 2013.

It may sound like a parody, but the Cartoon Brew website has a publicity picture of this “King Robo”. Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Goofy, and Pluto (plus Pluto’s doghouse and Steamboat Willie’s riverboat) into one giant robot! Like they say, we couldn’t make this stuff up. Check it out.

Like last month, this month's best item is a big reprint book from Fantagraphics, this time two years of Pogo. Buy it buy it buy it. The Mickey Mouse hardbacks are impressive too.

The diversity of sources continues. This includes some items from Kids Can Press, a Garfield thing from Papercutz, one from Toon Books, and a couple of Dragon Punchers from Top Shelf that I pass over as overjuvie.

This month makes up for the last two: lots of interesting stuff, and, furry aside, a lot of new publishers showing up. I hope both trends hold up. There are still way too many zombies, though. Like Zombies vs. Cheerleaders #4, 'Easily the greatest 21 letter titled comic in history- that has zombies and cheerleaders!

Man, there's hardly anything this month. I threw in the latest Girl Genius collection; I'm not sure if there's anything furry in it beside the robot dog, but it's the only thing in this month's post that I've ordered.

Quite a lot of material this month in addition to the usual; in particular, two impressive hardbacks from Fantagraphics and a new volume of Dungeon from NBM. Also the zombie glut is worse than ever, and an unusual number of manga series come to an end. Most were short-lived compared to Sgt. Frog's 21 volumes, but Hikaru no Go (non-anthro) ends at 23.

Free Comic Book Day coming up! Wahoolazooma. Herewith FCBD furriness for which I have no order numbers, though they're presumably in the range JAN110001-JAN110041.

I'm unfamiliar with most of the stuff so I rely on quoting the blurbs more than usual.

Nintendo's Wii has been pretty good to furries who enjoy "Zelda-esque" 3-D platformers. The console shipped with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, featuring a lupine Link, followed shortly by the generally considered superior port of ?kami. The console's backwards compatibility also brought the ridiculously furry Star Fox Adventures to the table.

Now Disney Interactive's Epic Mickey is continuing the tradition. But does the game give as good as the above?