FINDING CAPTAIN NEMO - EPISODE 1

A few months ago, over in Lesser Blogfordshire ( at m-a-w-h.blogspot.com go on, pay a visit, there’s lots of stuff in the archive for you to read) I wrote a piece about submarine movies, a topic which has fascinated me since I don’t know when.

Or rather I do. When I was about 8 years old, with an issue dated March 4th 1972, a comic started being published called “Walt Disney’s Donald and Mickey” and inside its pages was a two page comic strip called “The Adventures of Captain Nemo” based loosely upon a film which, at 8, I’d not ever seen, and featuring a captain who seems far less angry than might be expected if you’d only ever met him in the book. This was the Walt Disney adaptation of  Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and the drawings featured the most amazing submarine that I had never seen, their design for the “Nautilus”.

Now in order to illustrate that article, I hunted down an image of the fictional “Nautilus” submarine online and pasted it into my blog and that was when I remembered the comic strip, but all of my searches came up with nothing. I could not find any record of it. The internet cupboard was bare and, as we all are aware these days, if it doesn’t exist on the internet, then it probably never existed at all. It was almost as if I’d imagined the whole thing and the comic strip which I thought I remembered had simply never been...

Happily, on a more recent occasion, and because I had finally found a moment to do so, I was going through some boxes of stuff I’ve got at home and, because I rarely throw anything away, I found the first six issues of that comic in one of them, albeit  brutally fastened together in a way that would make collectors shudder, and which had also been partially scribbled upon (in a way designed not to preserve them in a pristine condition for all eternity) by my more vandalism-inclined younger self.

Even better, within their colourful pages was to be found the two page “Adventures of Captain Nemo” printed in black (in issue one but in later editions in various glorious shades of blue) ink on the kind of pinkish-hued newsprint paper usually reserved for the financial papers.

Anyway, in a vague effort to demonstrate that my memory isn’t always completely wrong, here are the first two pages of that first adventure, from “Donald and Mickey” issue number 1, which I can still remember reading as if it only happened yesterday, and I hope that you’ll be as excited by the drawings of that magnificent submarine as I once was, even though I’m sure that you’ll now be far more familiar with it than I was back then.

Enjoy!