In 1954, a new sort of amusement park was being built. It was meant to be unlike anything ever seen before, a tourist destination for the whole family that brought the films of the Walt Disney Company to life. To help promote its creation, and earn funding towards its construction, Walt Disney entered the still new frontier of television. During the first episode of Walt Disney’s Disneyland, the future was teased, but Walt couldn’t help but wax philosophical on the early days of the studio. Sure, Steamboat Willie was not the cartoon that started his career. He did not create Mickey Mouse on his own. But those humble beginnings, of a small group of animators no longer having a distributor, unsure of what the future would hold? Walt spoke words that would be quoted time and again - “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing. That it was all started by a mouse.”
Even after his death, the Walt Disney Company continued to grow. The classic characters of Mickey, Donald, and Goofy were still instantly recognizable symbols of Americana. From Tezuka to Bluth, the influence of these small cinematic shorts could be seen, and can still be felt to this day. Whether by design or by happy accident, Mickey helped forever change the world of animation.
In his youth, David Gonterman was extremely fond of these fanciful cartoons. Throughout the 1980’s, that joy did not diminish, finding enjoyment in the newest works of animation, especially The Secret of NIMH. While not a Disney film, it was directed by Don Bluth, who had come from the Disney cloth and struck out on his own, making a number of classics without such corporate constraints. When the film came out, it heavily influenced Davey, inspiring him to create his first original character - Jonathan Brisby. The grandson of Mrs. Brisby from the movie, the character inhabited Davey’s mind for the better part of a decade, serving as an imaginary friend. One who finally jumped to the printed page when he started attending college, a short-running strip appearing in his university’s newspaper.
When Gonterman started to engage with the Internet back in 1995, Jonathan Brisby was right there with him. Having a cameo in his Blood and Metal fanfic series, he jumped over into his own stories, meeting with the cast of Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers. He continued to be a featured player in the Firestorm line, in many ways becoming the mascot of Foxfire Studios. Even in the post-NiTRO era of Gonterman, Johnny was right there. He starred in the webcomic Fauna Force. Once renamed “Johnny Briz,” he would be part of Mystic Mice and its pseudo-sequel, Livewire Latte. He wanted him to be the embodiment of classic cartoons, while having that rebellious streak that Bluth provided, reframing him as such in the Disney Echo series Micky V Oswald.
However, regardless of how much prose he wrote using the character, Gonterman felt that Johnny would fit best in the world of searilzed, visual narrative. Having given up on webcomics four years prior, the need to bring Johnny Briz back to life was too overwhelming. Holding his breath, he typed up a Kickstarter project, it going live in August, 2012. Though funding would not be successful, he did not let that small failure deter him, and a few short months later, the first strip was uploaded to DeviantArt.
While Scarlet P.I. had been a pencil-to-paper affair, Davey went all out. Inked lines, full color, an outlined narrative. Removing all explicit references to copyrighted material that had been in previous iterations of Johnny’s story, the hope was to somehow monetize the strip in spite of the Kickstarter failing. For over a year, he worked diligently, with the occasional hiccup in the release schedule.
In early 2015, the strip stopped updating. When a handful of people asked what happened, Gonterman was frank. He felt that he could not be a part of the webcomic community, no matter how hard he tried. He felt his old work, now two decades old, was still haunting him. That trolls would come out of the woodwork and still poke at him, looking for a reaction. The straw that broke the webcomic’s back was one who particularly went in hard, asking about his love life in response to one page showing Johnny being hugged by a human woman. Incensed by it all, he put his drawing pen down, and stepped away.
At the time this archive has been written, David Gonterman has stayed true to his word. Aside from a handful of drawings meant to accentuate his written work, there have been no further The Ballad of Johnny Briz strips, or any webcomics at all. Instead, he has doubled down on his Dungeons & Dragons fandom, creating game modules and even writing a novel set in the universe, Ashes of the Dawn.
Will there ever be another comic by Davey Foxfire? That’s hard to say. It is not without precedent that he has revisited that which he once abandoned. So perhaps one day, he’ll dust off the tablet, and after hearing Johnny whisper in his ear, draw up a brand new adventure of the mouse that started it all.
