pictured in the 1960s
Cartoon Brew reports Roman Arambula, the Mexican cartoonist and illustrator best known for his 15-year tenure on the “Mickey Mouse” comic strip, died following a heart attack on March 19, 2020. He was 83.
Arambula was born in Guadalajara on September 18, 1936. He graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico after studying drawing and fine arts, and started his career as an assistant cartoonist and illustrator for a variety of Mexican publications. This work caught the attention of Richard K. Tompkins’s Dibujos Animados, a local animation studio who hired him to work on commercials. From here, Arambula then went on to animating on Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Fractured Fairy Tales, and more at Gamma Productions. His role at Gamma went beyond solely animation though and included storyboarding, layout, and backgrounds. In the late 1960s when Gamma closed, Arambula was hired to work for a small animation company in Dallas before he moved his family to Los Angeles. In LA, he was hired by Hanna-Barbera Productions, and worked on the layout and animation for shows such as Josie and the Pussycats and Scooby-Doo.
In addition to the animation work in the 1970s, Arambula pursued his passion for comic books, something he had previously done in Mexico, by working at Western Publishing on their Donald Duck comic books. In 1975, when Floyd Gottfredson, the artist on the “Mickey Mouse” comic strip, retired, Arambula was chosen to be the principal artist and stayed in the role until 1990. Alongside his tenure on “Mickey Mouse,” Arambula worked on the Hanna-Barbera comics Marvel were publishing. He storyboarded for different cartoons, namely The Addams Family and Tailspin in the years that followed. When he retired, Arambula continued drawing and making comic books.
The thoughts of all at Multiversity Comics go out to his friends and family.
