By the summer of 1937, Disney’s Mickey Mouse cartoons and the syndicated strip had already become worldwide ambassadors of American mass media. Like Charlie Chaplin in the previous decade, Mickey’s simple visual signature and deft antics translated well from Europe to Asia. The Mouse had effectively displaced The Tramp as an international icon of slapstick. But in August 1937, with Floyd Gottfredson’s Medioka story line, the ambassadorship becomes self-conscious and reflexive..even politicized by both creators and at least one government. Mickey journeys off to the vaguely Slavic kingdom of Medioka to save its corrupt government and oppressed people from feudalism with American ingenuity, empiricism and democratic character. It is the most explicit exercise of the American exceptionalism mythology we are bound to see in comics history, even if it has all of the political subtlety of a Yellowstone episode.