Some hard-to-get classics are about to get a lot more
accessible.

From 1934 to 1944, Good Housekeeping magazine featured
a legendary series of Disney one-page features. Every month, Walt Disney’s
latest cartoons were transformed into funny stories in verse, and these verses
were illustrated with awesome painted art by two famous studio illustrators, Tom
Wood and Hank Porter.

Now Gemstone Publishing is collecting all of these
Disney Good Housekeeping pages in one book. And we’re grounding them in
history, by presenting them together with a king-size helping of related Disney
art, comics, and merchandise images.

Mickey And The Gang: Classic
Stories In Verse contains all 123 published Good Housekeeping
features and one previously unpublished piece. It also includes dozens of photos
showing Disney toys and games from the vintage pre-war period, as well as gag
cartoons and text features from the pages of Mickey Mouse Magazine,
Mickey Mouse Weekly, and Walt Disney’s Comics and
Stories.

It also includes never-before-reprinted Disney Sunday comic
strips by Floyd Gottfredson and Al Taliaferro, pages of rare comic book art by
Walt Kelly, Al Taliaferro, Daan Jippes, and Wilfred Haughton, and hundreds of
rare animation story sketches by Carl Barks, Albert Hurter and
others.

“Our goal is to let a modern audience see these Good
Housekeeping pages the way their original audiences did,” said David
Gerstein, Gemstone Publishing’s Archival Editor and the book’s author.
“Let them turn from the Good Housekeeping page on a cartoon like
Mickey’s Rival, for instance, to an adaptation of the same cartoon that
was done for the Sunday comics, and then to the original publicity art that
might have been up on theatre walls. Readers will be able to experience the art
of Walt Disney as this new, exciting phenomenon that it was in the
1930s.”

Mickey And The Gang: Classic Stories In Verse
360-page full color book will be featured in the September 2005 Previews
from Diamond Comic Distributors, and is due in stores in November. The
10-5/8” X 12-1/2” softcover edition will retail for $29.99. The same
book in deluxe hardbound edition, limited to 1,000 copies, will be
$149.99.