Donald and the Wheel - In Four Color!

One of my earliest posts here on 2719 Hyperion was a short feature about one of my favorite Disney cartoons: Donald and the Wheel. In digging through my long boxes recently I rediscovered a little piece of four-color fun I had forgotten I had—the Dell Comics adaptation of that 1961 Donald Duck short.

Most would likely dismiss this Donald Duck comic book as being fairly inconsequential. Typically, if a Duck comic from this time period doesn’t possess a Carl Barks pedigree, it tends to be largely ignored, let alone inspire any kind of discussion.

While adapting the vast majority of the cartoon’s sequences, the comic also added a framing sequence involving Huey, Dewey and Louie and established a narrative with Donald himself being a character, and not just assuming roles within the story. The Spirits of Progress, the father-son duo who are the central narrators of the tale, fully appeared in the comic, going beyond the rot scoped silhouettes they were in the cartoon.

One feature that remained consistent from film to page was the clever rhyming dialog that the Spirits cleverly engage in.

In keeping with the “edu-tainment” nature of both short and comic story, the inside, cover pages and the back cover provided some fun illustrated facts and diagrams.

Certainly in no way groundbreaking or otherwise significant, but a neat little piece of memorabilia nonetheless.