An early Mickey Mouse cel with its original background was sold at auction last year for more than $250,000.
The artist reveals, in an autobiographical strip, that the idea for "Maus," his Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative, was sparked by the blatant racism in an early Mickey Mouse movie.
Astro Boy's simple, spherical construction suggests both the early Mickey Mouse and Max Fleischer's Betty Boop, and a 30's Deco elegance clings to the design even today.
If the 20-year extension was unconstitutional, early Mickey Mouse depictions would no longer belong exclusively to the Walt Disney Company -- although Disney would retain trademark protection for the character.
This is a partial list of what seems to haunt him: frogs, chess pieces, deep-sea creatures, pigs, beetles, fetuses, early Mickey Mouse, wattles, coats of arms.
THE LIBRARY of Congress has acquired its largest-ever donation of comic books, as well as other pop-culture memorabilia, including early Mickey Mouse storyboards and collectibles that date back to the dawn of American newspaper comics.
Early Mickey Mouse and Beatrix Potter designs are feverishly sought after, as is the work of Eric Ravilious, who was a designer for Wedgwood before he served as an official war artist and was killed in 1942.
Early Mickey cartoons, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, impressed audiences with innovative use of sound for comedic effect by synchronizing the actions of the character with the music and audio (talkies had just begun to gain commercial viability and popular appeal).
As one dissenter, Justice Steven G. Breyer, estimated, only 2percentt of the work copyrighted between 1923 and 1942 continues to be commercially exploited (for example, the early Mickey Mouse movies, whose eminent entry into the public domain prompted Congress to act in the first place).
Cleveland's wife, Gabriela, a lawyer with the Illinois Department of Transportation, seems bemused by her husband's obsession: "I learned from his sister at our rehearsal dinner that he postponed a planned marriage proposal so he could disappear to Iowa to bid on an early Mickey Mouse poster he'd heard about in a farm auction".
Those early Mickey Mouse shorts were among the first films to feature synchronized sound.
