I was going through Christopher Finch “The Art of Disney” this week end and stopped on few drawings from 1931 “The Beach Party” and 1935 “the Band concert”. Both shorts feature the supporting character Horace Horsecollar

I looked up this little guy on Youtube and google and finally found a full comic strip dating from the begining of the 40s and drawn by the excellent Floyd Gottfredson. Like me you probably don’t know this artist so listen to that. In 1935, he took over Ubi Werks and for 45 years, was in charge of all the Mickey Mouse comic strips after a very short career as a Disney inbetweener.

His style has evolved a lot in 45 years and probably in line with what people were doing in the animation department. If you want to know a bit more about him and his style, head to the following website http://stp.ling.uu.se/~starback/dcml/creators/floyd-gottfredson.html You will find there some example of the different art periods but as a summary, here is the classification made by the author.
1930 Primordial

1930-33 Mosozoic

1933-36 Classic 1

1937-1939 Classic 2

1939-1942 Hellenistic

1943-1946 Gothic

1947-1955 Neomezozoic
Personallly I really like the latest style but my favourite is the 1935 when characters didn’t have pupils and limbs were still rubber hose like. Here is an example:

Funny enough that strip is dated from 1935 but the author mentioned above would have called that style the 1933 “Mosozoic” instead of Classic 1.

If you like this designs, go and have a look on Clark Snyder’s Inspiration Grab Bag blog.  He posted 100 of Floyd Gottfredson Disney’s comic strips.