Mickey and the Ice Sword, the historic return

Forty years ago, it saw the light on the pages of the timeless weekly Mickey and the Ice Sword, a little great classic of the Italian Disney school. Written and illustrated by a Massimo DeVita in full form, published in three installments on albums number 1411-1413 of December 1982, Mickey and the Ice Sword it is a story that is etched in the memory of an entire generation of readers. Today at 40 years since that first historic episode, and after almost 30 absence from the pages of Mickey Mouse (the saga is made up of three other chapters, of which the fourth and last was released in 1993), The Ice Sword come back for a new generation of readers.

On Topolino 3496 (out on newsstands, comic shops and online stores from Wednesday 30 November) begins Mickey Mouse and the Legend of the Ice Sword. In four episodes, Mickey and Goofy (as the “cousin of Alf”, the hero of the legends) will return to visit the world of Argaar, where time passes faster than our world – and where 8,800 years have passed since last battle against the evil Prince of the Mists. Meanwhile, Massimo De Vita has retired from the world of comics, and the honor (and burden) of writing the sequel lies with screenwriter Marco Nucci and al designer Cristian Canfaillawith the colors of Angela Capolupo and the Maaw Illustration Art Team.

But water has passed under the bridge in our world as well. In the early 80s the fantasy genre it was very different from how we know it now. The most famous sagas inevitably veered towards two distinct strands: works with literary ambitions, in the footsteps of the forerunner Tolkienoften inspired by mythological sagas and local folklore. And the stories pulp and entertainmentdaughters of the anthological magazines of the 50s and 60s, populated by strong barbarians and damsels in distress, often contaminated by the nascent genre of RPGs. With few exceptions, the fantastic was not yet a mass phenomenon and was regarded as genre narrative and second or third order.

The Disney school of Mickey Mouse, which has always been the excellence of Italian comics, was already renowned for its great parodies. But there was talk of poems like the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey or the Jerusalem Liberatedor great classics such as Sandokan And Around the world in eighty days. The Ice Sword cannot be placed in the vein of parodies, but perhaps for the first time it drew inspiration from both ends of the fantasy genre: The Lord of the Rings and Norse mythology from the more literary side, e The Sword of Shannara as a representative of entertainment fiction, with a pinch of Star Wars for good measure. Of these, De Vito managed to synthesize the most fascinating styles of fantasy – those ofhigh fantasy and of the struggle between good and evil, with spells, dragons and dark adversaries – fusing them with the humour and the lightness of the best Mickey Mouse stories.