Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #1

History

Dell Publishing released the issue in November 1949 under the management of editor Eleanor Packer, with Alice Nielsen Cobb serving as story editor and Tom McKimson as art director. The cover was painted by Walt Kelly — himself a former Disney animator who had left the studio in 1941, armed with a letter of recommendation from Walt Disney, and was simultaneously launching his Pogo newspaper strip through the Hall Syndicate that same year — giving the book an unusually star-studded production pedigree. Carl Barks submitted artwork for his two Donald Duck contributions in June and August of 1949 respectively, and the assembled roster of interior artists — including Manuel Gonzales, Roger Armstrong, Jesse Marsh, Gil Turner, Jim Pabian, and Bill Wright — represented essentially the entire Western Publishing stable of Disney talent at the time.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First Dell Giant comic book ever published, establishing the oversized, higher-priced anthology format that Dell would use for dozens of subsequent Disney titles throughout the 1950s.
• Published November 1949 by Dell Publishing Co.; 132 pages, full color, cover price 25 cents — more than double the standard 10-cent comic of the era.
• Cover art by Walt Kelly, the future creator of the Pogo newspaper strip, who was already working at Dell and had launched Pogo in syndication just months earlier in May 1949.
• Lead story 'Letter to Santa' — written and drawn by Carl Barks — features an early and fully comedic outing for Uncle Scrooge McDuck, whose rivalry with Donald over who gets credit for the nephews' steam-shovel gift drives the plot.
• Barks contributed two Donald Duck stories to the issue; artwork for the first was submitted June 1, 1949, and for the second, August 4, 1949, per Grand Comics Database records citing Michael Barrier's scholarship.
• Includes a Cinderella story (with Gus, Jaq, Lady Tremaine, and the Fairy Godmother) published before the Walt Disney animated feature film Cinderella reached theaters in early 1950.
• Character roster spans a wide cross-section of the Disney universe of the time: Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Pluto, Dumbo, Bambi and Thumper, the Seven Dwarfs, José Carioca, Pinocchio, the Three Little Pigs, Li'l Bad Wolf, and Cookieland characters.
• The series ran for nine issues under Dell from 1949 through 1958, later continued by Gold Key and then Gemstone (often using reprints from the original Dell run), with Barks's stories from this issue reprinted internationally and collected in the Fantagraphics Complete Carl Barks Disney Library.

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