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!
