The most well-known nephews in the Disney canon are Donald Duck’s: Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The trio first made their debut in comic form on October 17, 1937. The following year, in 1938, the trio made their animated debut in the aptly titled Donald’s Nephews. Pretty cut and dry for some of Disney’s most iconic and long-lasting characters. Yet, the characters they were created to counterpart — Mickey’s two nephews — have a more intricate debut history. Morty and Ferdie are not defined by a single debut, but by a prolonged process of instability across media, where character is constructed, obfuscated, and re-established.

The duo first appeared on the September 18, 1932 Mickey Mouse Sunday strip. In their initial comic appearance, they are presented as children of a Mrs. Fieldmouse—then not explicitly identified as Mickey’s sister. Their initial appearance does not explicitly identify them as relatives of Mickey, yet this quickly becomes implied the following week on September 25 when they refer to Mickey as “Unca Mickey”. What this first Sunday page provides is a critical foundation exemplifying their core characteristics: mischief and havoc.

(above) The first strip featuring Mickey’s nephews, and (below) a panel from the September 25 panel with the first “Unca Mickey” reference.

Their havoc manifests metatextually as their antics overwhelm finer details of characterization, resulting in neither child being named until the October 30, 1932 Sunday page. This month-long interregnum sans naming reflects the instability of the duo’s early characterization. This is further emphasized within the comic panels as only one nephew is given a name—Mortimer Fieldmouse—leaving the other nephew unnamed.

Within the finer details of Disney lore, this name—Mortimer—is often associated with an earlier naming suggestion for Mickey himself. The suggestion came from Walt Disney’s wife, Lillian, at the same time that Walt was navigating the loss of his rights to Oswald and uncertainty over his own future. Metatextually, the presence of a Mickey relative named Mortimer reinforces the instability of character, and reminds readers that these stories exist within the early days of Mickey’s own rapidly defining world.

However, this page also gives some definition as it is the first instance of Mickey definitively referring to the duo as his nephews.

(above) October 30, 1932 strip featuring the first instance of a nephew being named.

Despite the comic strip clearing away initial ambiguity, more would implant itself into the Disney ecosphere with the 1933 cartoon short Giantland. The comics’ examples of a nephew duo are quite clear, but Mickey’s role as an uncle to mouse children would become more ambiguous.

This short opens with a large Mouse nibling group listening to Mickey read a bedtime story. The niblings call Mickey “Uncle Mickey,” but the short adds in further ambiguity by not identifying any of the children explicitly, thus making it unclear which are the two nephews present in the comics—or whether none of them are, and if Mickey might only be the niblings’ honorary uncle.

Interestingly, the Giantland cartoon would be adapted into a Sunday storyline that ran from March 11, 1934 until April 29, 1934. As a result of deriving elements from the pre-existing short, this comic strip storyline too has the ambiguous nature of which child is whom. Each Sunday would begin with Mickey telling his niblings about another part of the adventure against Rumplewatt the Giant. However these children—like in the cartoon—are never distinctively identified. Through background actions the audience can see more mischief being wrecked upon Mickey’s home, thus indicating that this quality befalls the numerous Mickey niblings.

Concurrent with Giantland’s release, the publisher David McKay introduced even more ambiguity when it published the “Mickey Mouse Story Book,” a repackaging of material from the 1931 book “Mickey Mouse Movie Stories,” consisting of images from 1930 and 1931 cartoons with alternative prose describing the plots. The cover exhibits Mickey—alongside a sleepy Pluto—reading a book to two unidentified mouse children.

The cover draws a connection to Giantland as it implies that the contents of the actual book—the aforementioned cartoon reuse—is what is being read to the children: a storytelling session similar to that in the Giantland cartoon. Since the interior of the physical book is repeated from 1931, however, it contains no framing devices, mentions, or references to the 1933 cover’s children audience. Thus this cover leads audiences to identify the duo as either Mickey’s nephews or two of the Giantland niblings, or both, making their relationship to Mickey somewhat vague once again.

(It must be noted that the “Mickey Mouse Story Book” bears only a 1931 copyright date, leading many in the past to presume the book was actually released in 1931—with its cover illustration thus representing the first appearance of mouse nephews anywhere. But as period newspapers and bookstore advertisements show, the “Story Book” was not actually released until late 1933; its 1931 copyright date refers only to the book’s interior contents, reprinted as they were from 1931.)

On June 16, 1934, Mickey’s nephews—presumed to be Morty and Ferdie, although never referred to by name—make a decisive return in the animated cartoon Mickey’s Steam Roller. This would be the duo’s first distinctive animated appearance as a duo sans any other unnamed mice children. Carrying over the common traits from the comics, the duo play and cause mischief throughout the short. The year 1934 also saw the instance of the original Orphan’s Benefit—remade in color in 1941—wherein Mickey and friends perform for many mice children. Though, based on the title, it can’t be assumed that these children are all Mickey’s relatives. However, it does continue to lean into the grey area of Mickey Mouse caring for or entertaining quantities of identical children.

The nephew duo would return to the Sunday strip again on March 31, 1935. Here, Mickey refers to them as “my nephews, Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse!”, thus—for the first time—giving both boys distinctive names. In this newest appearance, they continue to delight in mischief, but they also foreshadow their more famous counterparts when interacting with Donald Duck.

Donald, not yet an uncle, is upset about being called one. Little does he know… (March 31, 1935).

The duo would serve as the prototypes for what would eventually become Donald’s nephews—both in messing with him and in how they caused disruption. On the Sunday page from April 7, 1935, the duo bait Donald into impressing them. Donald ends up overexerting himself, thus losing control and crashing a croquet ball into Mickey’s house. This encounter feels reminiscent of The Hockey Champ, wherein Donald’s hubris becomes his downfall as he attempts to one-up his nephews with his skills.

Before the year was up, the duo would return again on December 15, 1935. Within these appearances, the duo reinforce the role that they came to inhabit within the strip. As Disney historian David Gerstein puts it:

“By 1935 a satisfying middle ground was achieved, with Mickey portrayed less as a parent, more as a big brother.”

From this point on, the duo would appear at various intervals within the comics. However, when the duo appeared outside of the newspaper realm, these appearances continued to be more ambiguous, less defined, and lean into the larger nibling groups.

In one 1937 book entitled “Mickey Mouse and His Friends” a trio of mice niblings appear in a single image before a text adaptation of Mickey’s Elephant. Entire crowds of niblings—often, as before, identified as orphans—make further animated appearances in Gulliver Mickey (1934), Orphans’ Picnic, Mickey’s Circus (1936) and Pluto’s Party (1952). Morty and Ferdie themseves make another animated appearance in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in 1938’s Boat Builders; when a crowd assembles to watch the launch of Mickey’s, Donald’s, and Goofy’s boat, the duo can be seen climbing up a dock piling at the left of the shot..

Mickey’s nephews might not have stuck around as prominently as other recurring characters, but their early appearances were hugely influential. Their exact roles and status took time to become explicit, and the two would often fade out into ambiguous crowds of many mice children. Yet they helped to establish Mickey as an authority figure and companion to kids within his universe. Morty and Ferdie also acted as the prototype testing ground in small ways for their more popular counterparts: Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Since the 1980s, the duo have made newer appearances in animation including as role players in 1983’s Mickey’s Christmas Carol, with Morty as Tiny Tim, and in 2017’s The Scariest Story Ever: A Mickey Mouse Halloween Spooktacular. The nephews have also remained recurring characters in comics from the 1930s up to the present day, logging hundreds of appearances annually around the world. Now as Mickey’s earliest stories come into the public domain each year , fans and readers alike have the opportunity to better understand Morty and Ferdie’s origin: not to see them as only static figures lost in the Disney vault, but for the influential voice that they are. The public domain also allows the creators to give the duo new creative expressions that were overlooked at their original inception. Plus, some enterprising person might even feign to name each and every nibling.

NOTES: As of 2026, all published Mickey Mouse cartoons and printed material from 1930 and before are in the public domain. In the course of researching this piece, I discovered that the Mickey Comics from 1931 through October 1935 were not renewed. The earliest renewal for the strip that I could locate was for the week dated November 18, 1935. These weekly renewals continued on from this date. The mentioned cartoons from 1932-1941 as well as the 1937 Donald Duck comic are still copyrighted until the end of the 95th year following their publication.

SOURCES:
Mickey Sundays; Original copyright and its renewal for 1937 Mickey Mouse and His Friends © 1 May 1937, code AA231977; renewal is © 28 May 1964, code R338799.

SPECIAL THANKS to David Gerstein and his input to this piece.