Pre-1950s Disney daily and Sunday comic strip art has always been hard to
find. It used to be collectors’ general understanding that after photostats to
each strip were shipped off to King Features Syndicate, the original art was
handed over to Western Publishing, there to be cut, pasted, and remounted for
later use in comic books. The real story, however, was actually somewhat
grimmer. Western, it turns out, worked from photostats too. The original art
stayed put at Disney until the mid-1950s, when an unsentimental Comic Strip
Department executive decided to clear some storage room space. Staffers were
given a limited time to pull and save significant strip originals. Then the rest
were destroyed.

Strips from after the destruction date seem mostly to
have survived, with a large percentage still residing at Disney today. But what
of the earlier strips? The survival rate for each feature seems to correspond
directly to how much time its respective creative team had to rescue pages
before zero hour.

The Mickey Mouse team, headlined by Mouse Man Floyd
Gottfredson, seems to have saved a number of representative strips from nearly
every significant continuity. But the Donald Duck team, headlined by Al
Taliaferro, didn’t do as well. Donald starred in Silly Symphony Sunday
strips from August 30, 1936 to December 5, 1937; in 1938, he got a daily strip
of his own, with a dedicated Sunday following in late 1939. Publisher Russ
Cochran estimates that from Donald’s pre-1940 output, only a handful of dailies
and approximately seven Silly Symphony Sundays survive.

So it’s
always big news when one is sold… and it’s just happened. Cochran’s own Art
Auction #75 (June 16, 2006) saw no less than the second Donald Duck
Silly Sunday — September 6, 1936 — bring in a feather-raising
$22,000.00! Apart from the strip’s historical significance, its subject matter
may have added to its desirability: the storyline, with the rascally early
Donald tormenting a captive Goofy, represents the kind of slapstick humor that
Disney generally abandoned after World War II.

Okay… that’s one
early Donald Sunday strip. Six others — two of them paired with same-dated
Mickey strips — presently exist in private collections. Where and when will
more turn up?