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Disney comics are comic books and comic strips featuring characters created by the Walt Disney Company, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck. The first Disney comics were newspaper strips appearing from 1930 on, starting with the Mickey Mouse comic strip. Mickey Mouse Magazine, the first American newsstand publication with Disney comics, launched in 1935. In 1940, Western Publishing launched the long-running flagship comic book, Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, which reached 750 issues in September 2019. Uncle Scrooge, launched in 1952, reached issue #450 in June 2019. In recent decades, Disney comics have seen a decline of popularity in the United States. In the rest of the world Disney comics have remained very successful, especially in Europe, where weekly Disney comics magazines and monthly paperback digests are national best sellers. Disney comics have been the basis for academic theory, cultural criticism, and fan-created databases.