Manuel Gonzales (March 3, 1913 – March 31, 1993) was a Spanish-American Disney comics artist. He worked on the Mickey Mouse comic strip from 1940 to 1981. Gonzales was born in Cabañas de Sayago, Zamora, Spain and died in Los Angeles. Biography 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 also as an artist in the Publicity Department creating pencil art for publicity drawings and Good Housekeeping Disney children's pages. Later working in the comic strip department, Gonzales took over the illustrating of the Mickey Mouse comic strip's Sunday page from Floyd Gottfredson in 1938. Only interrupted by his military service for the USA in World War II from 1942 to 1945, Gonzales performed this job until his retirement in 1981. During the war, he worked for the U.S. Army as an artist animating short newsreel clips promoting war bonds and the war effort. Bill Walsh wrote the scripts for the Sunday pages from 1946 to 1963. These pages told funny stories from Mickey Mouse's everyday life (Mickey was portrayed as a "guy next door" - a middle class citizen with a normal life), as well as doing sometimes surrealistic gags featuring Gonzales' specialty, Goofy. Gonzales and Walsh also introduced a new character to the Disney universe, the intelligent and witty bird Ellsworth, in 1950. In general, the Sunday pages have status as better than Gottfredson's daily gags of the time (also written by Walsh). Beside the Sunday pages, Gonzales worked on other Disney comic strips and illustrations. He inked Donald Duck and Scamp dailies, illustrated newspaper comic adaptations of different Disney films, like Song of the South, and illustrated some Disney books. He also worked on Disney's annual Christmas comic strip from 1960 to 1969. Gonzales grew up in Westfield, Massachusetts, where he went to school and picked tobacco during summer jobs as a boy. He later lived and went to art school in New York City. His 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. The flyer invited artists to bring their portfolios to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a job opportunity.