Every year around 250 Disney stories made in Italy are published. It is a hotbed of titles, characters, styles and imagery that has few equals in the world, certainly almost none in the Disney world.
It has been known for some time that Italy is more Disney than Disney, and online you can often find rankings of the best stories of a certain character or author, but critics and commentators have rarely taken the trouble to create order and canon within the vast production that arrives on newsstands, comic shops and bookstores every year, including series, albums and volumes.
It therefore seemed right and interesting to us to give an overview of the unpublished stories created in Italy and published over the course of the year Mickey Mouse, Paperinik e Topolino Juniorto photograph a Disney-like 2025 full, as usual, of ideas and creativity. It is an overview that reminds us how Italian Disney authors are able to invent great comics, create (or relaunch) characters, trying to find a balance between classic events and new ambitions. Who knows if these will be the stories that everyone will remember in the future…
Boom boom and intruding teethby Corrado Mastantuono (su Mickey Mouse 3610)
Born in 1997 by Corrado Mastantuono, Bum Bum Ghigno is one of the most memorable and successful Disney characters of the last thirty years. Duck painter, long-time friend of Donald Duck and Archimedes, Bum Bum is a loose cannon, a Fantozzi-esque character that Mastantuono defined as “an impatient immature”.
Mastantuono wrote and drew almost all of the adventures with Bum Bum Ghigno, and with Boom boom and intruding teeth the character has crossed the finish line of 70 stories. After a lifetime of dental sensitivity, Bum Bum decides to undergo the “Natural Smile” operation, which however revolutionizes his face, giving him a smile so perfect that it is unnatural. Bum Bum thus begins a second life which perhaps is not the one he really wants to live.
Boom boom and intruding teeth it’s a tasty and stylistically rare story, because rarely on Mickey Mouse we have seen graphic experiments: Bum Bum’s perfect teeth are made with photographic inserts and a photorealistic finish that make the character look like one of those fish with human teeth with a disturbing smile. The cartoonist used photos of real teeth collected on the web, in particular for the first cartoons in which Bum Bum shows off his new smile, while for the others he intervened, once the panel was finished, painting the teeth in a pictorial style.
This year Mastantuono has signed several notable stories, such as Daisy Duck in: Plush toys and dangerous games e Bum Bum and the reason for tamarindbut here the important gap between the usual image of Bum Bum and his new appearance contributes to creating a memorable story, which draws on Mastantuono’s usual skill as a narrator and illustrator.
At the same time comedy, fable about the valorization of diversity and satire of beauty standards that erase all uniqueness, Boom boom and intruding teeth plays by inserting an effect of surreality within a well-known and familiar structure such as Disney stories. Here’s an in-depth look.
