Keskustelujen arkisto

Dwight Decker writes:
> The fine line that has to be walked in this instance is
> keeping the ghosts from helping Scrooge too much, so
> that he solves his problems by his own wits instead of
> relying too much on supernatural assistance

Ah, but that gets us back to the original source material, as discussed
on this group last year - namely Dicken's/Mickey's (take your pick)
"Christmas Carol". Ghosts play a very large part in the life of
Ebeneezer/Scrooge! I haven't seen LO$ # 5 yet - my comics store hasn't
received it, as of yesterday - but it would seem appropriate for ghosts
to make an appearance there, given that LO$ # 1 has a lot in common
with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow! (Which is just another examples of
ghosts in Disney cartoons, if not in Bark's stories.) As for the
fundamentalists who object to supernatural elements in Disney comics,
they should be forced to watch all the witch cartoons such as Snow White
and Sleeping Beauty, the fairy cartoons such as Peter Pan, the ghost
cartoons such as Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia, ad infinitum.
Then, when they write their protest letters to the Powers That Be in
Disney, they won't single out the comic books as the root of all evil.
Anyway, these people probably regard the very concept of a talking
duck as blasphemy.

Wilmer Rivers

Knut:
>And it's historically incorrect, as Goofy can't be
>hypnotized according to a lot older story (sorry, don't have the reference
>here, but it's MM who gets visited by his (claimed) Uncle and Ant.

It's years since I read that story, but yes, you're right. I think they
claim to be Minnies relatives though. She gets quite insulted when
Mickey is trying to tell her that there is something strange going on.
In Norway this story is published in one of the big 'Jeg' books.
'Vi Mikke & Minni', I think.

Anyway, it's not that long since I read the 'Sinister Sorcerer' by
Bill Wright (he is the artist, at least).

- Now you are completely in my power... you will obey my commands...
Listen closely...
- Oh, yeah? Beat it bub... y' bother me!

- Why, I read somewhere that subnormal... er, heh! heh! I mean,
people with _special_ kinds of minds _can't_ be hypnotized!
- Huh? Oh, yuh mean _I_ got one o' them _special minds_, Mickey?
- Yes... there probably aren't over half-a-dozen minds like yours
in the whole world, Goofy!
- Uh-haw! Always knew there wuz somep'n _different_ about me!

- Relax... you are very tired... very sleepy!
- Thuh heck I am.. yuh can't hypnertize _me_!
I got a _special_ mind!

Over to something else.

David found a Rota story in an Egmont monthly from 1979.
I remember that story. Mostly because it's one of the very few good
(IMHO) stories that are published in this magazine. I whish they
could put those 'Zoom'-or-whatever-it-was stories into it instead
of the weekly, if they _have_ to publish them.
I think I've got to copies of that particular issue, BTW, but one
of them is in very bad shape.

That reminds me of a question I planned to ask. In 79 the Norwegian
monthly was called 'Donald Duck spesial'. In 1980 its name changed
to 'Mikke Mus'. The change took place over two issues. On the first
one Mickey is remiving the title 'Donald Duck Spesial', and Donald
is of course wondering what is going on. Mickey explains to him that
it's going to be his magazine, because he has never had an own title.
On the next one, Donald is leaving carrying the old title, and
whishing Mickey good luck.
Now to the question. Did this happen in the other Egmont countries
as well, or was this a Norwegian phenomenon?

BTW, before 'Donald Duck Spesial', it was called 'Walt Disneys M?neds-
blad' (Walt Disneys monthly magazines). It changed its name to
'Donald Duck Spesial' in 75 or 76. I've got just a few of these. They
contain (as far as I remember) only Italian stories, and not good ones.

Jorgen A. Bangor (jorgenb at ifi.uio.no)

Ah, yes. Maybe I should put something here too. I've had this in my
.plan for a while now:

- I'm Mickey Mouse, and this is Goofy.
- Yes, isn't it?

DWIGHT:
My scenes in "heaven" were a little silly? Oh, sure they were, I
guess. Sometimes I think my stories get too serious and bogged down in
detail and authenticity and I'm not silly enough. And of course, I'll
always do sillier stuff than you'd see in a Barks story, since I'm a
product of a childhood spent reading Barks, Will Elder/Harvey Kurtzman,
and watching old movies on TV.
But if those scenes were somewhat too goofy for you, keep in
mind that I intended to always be able to claim that entire sequence was
a dream of $crooge's oxygen starved brain. I'm still trying to figure
out how to explain that floating sword though. Swamp gas?

JORGEN:
As we probably discussed on here some time back, yes, the
Norwegian (in fact, most ALL the Egmont editions) began listing full
artist/writer credits soon after I went to work for them. But Disney
forced them to stop. In fact, your Norwegian editor told me he was
refusing to let Disney dictate such unreasonable policies to him which
were, in point of fact, even illegal by Scandanavian law. But apparently
Disney has ways of getting their way, because Norway did finally drop
the credits. As it's been explained to me (not by Egmont, since they
won't discuss it officially) there is also a Scandanavian law that says
that writers and artists credited in print for published material are
part owners of their work, and Disney naturally chose THIS as the more
important law and more worthy of violation.
Why was your message titled "Trojan Horse"? You didn't mention
any Trojan Horse.

JORGEN:

I'm sure someone told you already (I'm on the digests, you know); but
the U$ story you outlined is of course "Only A Poor Old Man".

And *thank you* for complimenting my .sig! Much obliged, I'm sure! As I told
Tryg, too, it's kinda neat since it comprises two of my major interests: music
and Barks!

All my best to all of you!

Mattias

**** Mattias Hallin ** Lund * Sweden ** <Mattias.Hallin at jurenh.lu.se> ****
* *
* "Oh bury me thar! With my battered git-tar! *
************** A-screamin' my heart out fer yew!" *************

Being rather heavily religious biased myself (I like it) I will try to make some
fundamental comments on ghosts and fundamentalists.

In general, I think much of the problem is outside the area of "fundamentalist
beliefs supported by the Bible" and very much more into "cultural prejudices
supported by a puritan tradition". This is not made any better by the main
cultural prejudices concerning comics (both in the US and I guess in all of
Scandanivia, at least in Norway), such as

1) They are for children and those in their early teens only

2) They should be sound and harmless and confirm in every part to the
American way of life

3) They can't - and shouldn't if they could - deal with serious issues like
life and death (and what comes after)

Dwight wrote:

>The lady seemed sincerely convinced that if children saw
>witches in popular media like comic books, they would be
>softened up for any Satanist recruiters who came by.

It always puzzles me when someone seems to mean that witches (or other
beings into or of the supernatural) could influence anyone negatively, just
by being shown. Had they been shown as neat and nice ladies I could
have understood it better, however it's long and far between positive
portrayals of witches, ghouls, demons or pagan gods in literature. And
when they are shown as good they seldom convinces anyone, although in
children's literature there has been some nice kid vampires lately, without
vampirism growing much in Norway.

> I exchanged a couple of letters with a fundamentalist Christian fan
>who was extremely upset about pagan goddesses appearing
>in a comic book he wanted to like...

How sad! He wil be missing a lot if not being able to enjoy Sandman, Lord
of The Rings, Silmarillion, the Narnia series, the Dive Comedy, Arabian
Knights or Norwegian Fairy Tales (highly recommended!) to mention but a few

> This is my comic book and what I say goes. And what I say is that
>she's a goddess. I almost hated to disappoint the guy, since he was
>trying so hard to like my modest little funnybook, but I can't please
>everybody.
>And Don Rosa doubtless feels the same way, so there you have it!

Keep on with your godesses! I think every author has the right to make stories
about any kind of character! And that every reader, critic and other author have
just as much right to critisise it (and try to make better stories) when those
characters or stories does not ring "true" or may give a false picture of reality,
paganism, godesses, cats or whatever.

Wilmer wrote:

>As for thefundamentalists who object to supernatural elements in Disney
>comics,they should be forced to watch all the witch cartoons such as Snow
>White and Sleeping Beauty, the fairy cartoons such as Peter Pan, the ghost
>cartoons such as Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia, ad infinitum.
>Then, when they write their protest letters to the Powers That Be in
>Disney, they won't single out the comic books as the root of all evil.
>Anyway, these people probably regard the very concept of a talking
>duck as blasphemy.

I agree with you in full, except for the last sentence. My experience is that they
tend to really enjoy duck comics ("Donald Duck is so funny"), and to hate
people comics (except for Asterix, Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, which all
perhaps more are in the vein of cartoon comics).

Don:

I think I (or at least Geir) commented upon this when Lo$ 5 appeared in Norway,
however just to repeat myself (or Geir) I would like to say that I really enjoyed
your story! It's great fun! And convenient for talking about death and the afterlife
for one's children (who BTW are exposed a lot to these kind of things in other
comics, children books, fairy tales and real life)! And I guess noone (except any
Rosa fundamentalist camp) will take your portrayal of heaven serious (golfing
and all that). To me it's the CONCEPT that's important. It's Heaven or not
Heaven. It's not WHAT KIND OF which is being shown that makes my mind
wander and wonder. Heaven is one of those things (like life) where it really is
hard to say what it's all about, but where everyone has the right to think for
themselves. Which of course, also includes the right to think as fundamentalists,
or even as a none fundamentalist Christian, which incidentially is by far the most
common kind of Christianity...

I think (to go back to my historical lectures of last year) that art bashing has been
very seldom in the Christian world the last couple of thousand years. I think the
very few exceptions have been the iconoclasm in the Eastern Church in the 8th
century and the puritan movement in the Protestant world in the 17th century.
Now, where would USA have been without those Puritans?

Bjo/rn Are

Bjorn-Are.Davidsen at s.televerket.tele.no

Dear Folks,

Andreas Bangor discussed my story "Two in One."

> WOW! So that was your story. I like it. It's not often we see anything
> new in a Magica story, but I can't remember seeing her copying herself
> before (lots of other thing though...).

Actually I was inspired by the very first Branca-drawn story I
ever saw: "The Robot Raiders of Magica De Spell" (US 210, 1986). In
that one, Magica invented robots that looked like her. She stole
the dime, but when she left the bin with it, all her robots (which
hid around the edges of the bin) started running as well, and the
Ducks had to split up and chase each one. A pretty good story -- I
LOVED it at the time (and it was the first Magica story I had ever
read). But as the years passed, I began thinking of how much better
the tale would have been if those robots had been able to think, and
if they had actually done something other than merely function as
props. Out of that grew "Two in One."

> Also the story has a funny gag (I'm not sure what to
> call it) at the ending, and that's not too usual nowadays.

Glad you liked it. In English: "But you could use *another*
shark! Double the effectiveness, you know!" "Double?! Did you say
DOUBLE?" "That's what I said!"

> BTW, David. How did you start writing for Egmont, and when will
> we see your next story?

I began writing letters to Disney Comics' letter columns in
1990. I then began to call Bob Foster and chat with him about the
contents of coming issues. Finally I submitted a translated,
rewritten Egmont story to him, which he liked. He bought three such
rewrites from me (none of which have yet appeared -- Disney never
printed them, but Gladstone inherited them and will use them in
1995). Then, when leaving Disney for Egmont, he promised to set me
up there if I ever wanted to do original stories. So I stopped
translating (only for a while -- when Gladstone started, I translated
15 more stories for them!) and began working for Egmont. "Two in
One" went back and forth four times until they deemed it acceptable.
The next one took two bouts with rewriting. After that, my stories
have (so far) been making it at the first time, so I must be gaining
experience!

My second story is called "Pork-Barrel Politics." It is based
on true stories of how pig-training was an easy way to make a mint of
money in 19th-century English vaudeville. Donald has read a book
about those events, so borrows three pigs -- Napoleon, Snowball, and
Squealer -- from Grandma's farm and commences training them. You'll
just have to wait to see what happens, but I promise it ISN'T the
least bit like you may expect. And the art is by Vicar. I'm
guessing it will be published next spring, but I don't know when.

And after "Pork-Barrel" I've done two more Donald stories and
three Mickeys for Egmont. I absolutely love writing for Mickey,
although it's harder to come up with something original for him than
with other characters because the old Mickey-catches-the-crooks saw
has been used so many times. So my first three Mickey stories are
all 8-page humor tales -- I attempted to do Barks-style stories with
Mickey, and you'll probably notice that a dead giveaway in my Mouse
tales is that Goofy is not used (yet). But I'm getting ahead of
myself here...

> Knut:
> >And it's historically incorrect, as Goofy can't be=20
> >hypnotized according to a lot older story (sorry, don't have the =
> reference=20
> >here, but it's MM who gets visited by his (claimed) Uncle and Ant.
>
> It's years since I read that story, but yes, you're right. I think they
> claim to be Minnies relatives though. She gets quite insulted when=20
> Mickey is trying to tell her that there is something strange going on.
> In Norway this story is published in one of the big 'Jeg' books.
> 'Vi Mikke & Minni', I think.

Jorgen: This story is Gottfredson's "The Gleam" (1941). One
of my all-time favorites.

> Anyway, it's not that long since I read the 'Sinister Sorcerer' by=20
> Bill Wright (he is the artist, at least).

Disney censorship at work again. The original title was "The
Black Sorcerer" but Disney made Gladstone change it when they
reprinted it (in MM 250, 1989). I don't care for this one so much --
Mickey is a rather boring character.

> Ah, yes. Maybe I should put something here too. I've had this in my
> .plan for a while now:
>
> - I'm Mickey Mouse, and this is Goofy.
> - Yes, isn't it?=20

That's from "Island in the Sky," right? (Can't resist a
challenge like that! ;-)

Best,

David Gerstein

Unsubscribe Disney-Comics

Hi everyone. Here's a message I prepared 3 days ago.

Wendigo poem
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yes Don, you once sent me the English script of the story. The "poem"
may be uninteresting for Americans that can't read the (rest of the) story,
but Europeans might be interested. I think I'll type it in if I can find it
(It's a bit "misplaced" at home right now..)

Disney comics Database
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As Per already announced last week, a new version is available, including
source files of C-programs. Everyone is invited to give comments and
locate errors in the index or in the programs. I had a better look at the
indexes after I sent them to Per, and already noticed the following:

- In the 'issues' files, the field "page layout" is often a question mark
in the case of newspaper reprints. This should be a space.

- The file gl-aa-dd.issues gives incomplete information for DD 284 through
DD 287.

- The Carl Barks index (CB.creator) is a bit messy, especially in the
beginning and the end of the file.

- There are some files on ftp that are _not_ embedded (yet) in the Database:
the Swedish Barks index from NAFS(k) ("nk5"), the Dutch Barks index, the
Danish index, and Gerstein's K-coded index ("k.index").

- The Rosa and Van Horn index from the Database do not contain all
information (yet) from the files "don-rosa.index" and "van-horn.index".

- We even have one story title in Norwegian! I forgot about that when I
made the legend.

- You can find some remarks and questions in both English and Dutch at
certain entries (e.g. [PER: WHICH ONE?]).

I hope to have solved most of these points in the next version...

Dutch Rosa
~~~~~~~~~~
Dutch DD Extra #10 contains Don Rosa's Lo$ chapter 8, "The Argonaut
of Wild Agony Creek". An excellent story! Apart from chapter 2, it's the best
part of Lo$ so far. Maybe it's because I like longer (24-page) stories?

The story has its own cover, by Wilma van den Bosch, I think. The quality
is quite poor.

Announced for DD Extra #11 is "The Son of the Sun"! At last! But I guess
that means we won't see Lo$ chapter 12 this Christmas, unless they put
several chapters in one DD Extra...

Carl Barks in Holland
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the fanzine "Stripschrift" #273 there was an interview with Barks, and
some photographs of his visit to Holland. Some interesting points:

- Bill Grandy [sic] says that Jippes was Barks' first choice for drawing
the story "Horsin' Around with History". He says Egmont told Barks
that Jippes didn't have time, without even asking Jippes. Then they
proposed their "own" artist Bill Van Horn...
(I wish Jippes had drawn that story! I haven't seen it yet, but I'm
sure Jippes would have done a better job than Van Horn. Sorry Fredrik!)

- One photograph shows Barks with all current Dutch artists. They are:
Ed van Schuijlenburg, Michel Nadorp, Mau Heymans, Jaap Stavenuiter,
Frank Jonker (writer), Wilma van den Bosch, Ben Verhagen, Jan Kruse
(writer), Daan Jippes, Bas Heymans.
I knew most of them, except Bas Heymans. Apparently, Mau has a little
brother...

A French issue
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My ex-colleagues gave me a goodbye-present: a special 60th anniversary
issue of the French "Picsou Magazine". Among others, it contained a
chronology of 60 years of Donald Duck. Some interesting things:

- 1956. Barks introduces Flintheart Glomgold, in French: Gripsou.
[part of the cover of Son of the Sun is shown, with the text "le
dessin a gauche est de Don Rosa"]

- 1957. In Italy, the writer Guido Martina starts a series of parodies
on famous heroes: the Three Musketeers, Marco Polo, etc. Drawn by
Carpi, De Vita, Bottaro, and Scarpa...

- 1963. The Beatles conquer the world, and Popop, Fethry Duck in English,
enters the life of Donald, created by Dick Kinney and the artist
Al Hubbard. [So even the French know Fethry's English name. Anyone
ever heard of Dick Kinney?]

- 1964. Tony Strobl finally shows us the youth of Donald. As a little child,
he helped his grandparents on the farm. [Which story can this be?]

- 1974. Fantomiald existed in Italy since 1969. His first adventures were
published in France in 1974. [So we know Paperinik's French name now.
BTW, Fredrik: Ludwig Von Drake is called Donald Dingue in French.]

- 1975. Barks gives Scarpa a sketch of a gag with Brigitte MacBridge.
[This sketch is actually shown! In one of Gladstone's Uncle Scrooge
comics, a drawing by Scarpa is shown, while the text said the original
Barks drawing was lost.]

- 1986. The "Disney Babies" are published. A creation of Claude Marin.

- 1989. In 1988, Le Journal de Mickey brought the first story of Keno
Don Rosa. In 1989, Picsou Magazine publishes every story by Don Rosa!

Stories in this special issue: some Taliaferro sunday strips, Barks (WDC
80), Cavazzano? (a special DD 60 story coded D 93135), Branca (D 92300)
and Van Horn (D 92211, pizza story)

That's all for now, but I will return...
--Harry.