Manuel Gonzales was a Spanish-American Disney comics artist.
16 Facts About Manuel Gonzales
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Manuel Gonzales worked on the Mickey Mouse comic strip from 1940 to 1981.
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Manuel Gonzales emigrated from Spain to the USA in 1918 via Ellis Island, and was employed at the Walt Disney Studios in September 1936, where he worked initially as an "in-betweener" on several short animated stories and on the motion picture Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and as an artist in the Publicity Department creating pencil art for publicity drawings and Good Housekeeping Disney children's pages.
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Later working in the comic strip department, Manuel Gonzales took over the illustrating of the Mickey Mouse comic strip's Sunday page from Floyd Gottfredson in 1938.
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Only interrupted by his military service for the USA in World War II from 1942 to 1945, Manuel Gonzales performed this job until his retirement in 1981.
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Beside the Sunday pages, Manuel Gonzales worked on other Disney comic strips and illustrations.
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Manuel Gonzales inked Donald Duck and Scamp dailies, illustrated newspaper comic adaptations of different Disney films, like Song of the South, and illustrated some Disney books.
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Manuel Gonzales worked on Disney's annual Christmas comic strip from 1960 to 1969.
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Manuel Gonzales grew up in Westfield, Massachusetts, where he went to school and picked tobacco during summer jobs as a boy.
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Manuel Gonzales later lived and went to art school in New York City.
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Manuel Gonzales's father, walking home from work one late-summer evening in 1936, tore a flyer from a telephone pole and gave it to Gonzales after dinner.
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Manuel Gonzales was interviewed and hired on the spot, given $200 and told to report in two weeks to the Hyperion Studios in Los Angeles to work as an animator.
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Manuel Gonzales received a "Mousecar" award and a Hyperion Club award personally from Walt Disney during his career.
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Manuel Gonzales was named a Disney Legend posthumously at the 2017 D23 award ceremony.
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Walt Disney, who was very fond of his artists, used to joke that Manuel had signed Disney's signature more than Disney himself had in his lifetime.
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Manuel Gonzales was married to his wife LaVonne, with whom he had two sons, Thomas and Daniel.