Keskustelujen arkisto

CB surviving comic book art

DAVID:

This is all the information from Previews, January, 1995, on the CB book:

Matti Eronen:

Carl Barks Surviving Comic Book Art

CB drew some 6,700 pages of comic book artwork between 1942 and 1969. But
today only
around 200 of those pages exist. What happened to the remainder, and which
are the
surviving originals? Answers to these and other questions can be found in
this all-new Barks-
reference book. It also features a index of Disney Duck paintings, a select
bibliography, and
more. Contains no reproductions of Barks artwork. Production limited to 500
copies. (952-90-
5644-3) COM

SC, 8*11, 68pg........................$24.95

/Nisse

Hello all!

I managed to get a German Micky Maus Das Bunte Monaatsheft nr:3 Marz 1952.
So, I was wondering what is it worth? I collect Finnish and U.S Disney
comics and the finnish ones from the 50's seem to be very valuable.
How is it with German ones?The comic is printed by Ehapa Verlag G.M.B.H
and is in good condition. The contents is the same as a Finnish AKU ANKKA
nr:6 1952. I don't know if Disney stories are as popular collectors items
as in Finnland for instance.

Does anybody know?

Timo

********************************************************************
* tikako at jyu.fi Timo Koskelainen Tavintie 3 A 2 *
* University of Jyvaskyla TEL: 358-41-685874 FIN-40400 JYVASKYLA *
********************************************************************

I'm currently re-reading my entire Dutch Disney collection (also for
checking and updating the Dutch files in the Database). I started in
1952, and now reached 1968. The last time I read those comics was in
1992, when I first indexed them. Some stories get a whole new
perspective after 3 years "mailing list experience"!

For instance: I repeatedly stated that Hard Haid Moe was never
published in Holland. I now know _one_ story featuring Moe!

It was published in Holland in 1966. I don't know the artist and the
story doesn't have a code, but it certainly looks like the "S-coded"
stuff from that time. I even think this is the _first_ story that was
made with Moe! Fethry does not appear in the story.

Donald drives a school bus to the countryside, where the children meet
Moe. In Dutch, they call him "Meneer Stijfhoofd", which could be translated
as "Mister Hard Head". An indication that "Hard Haid Moe" is a better
name than "Hog Haid Moe". Moe has a dog in the story, but it has no
name.

(And now: back to my comics...)

--Harry.

From: DANIEL::ADEBLIEC 18-FEB-1995 09:50:22.01
To: adebliec
CC:
Subj: A little analysis: How far does Marvel outself the competition?

Marvel is king of the heap, right? One of its top-20-or-so books (like
Incredible Hulk) must be outselling most all the independents, right?
Fortunately, all titles with 2nd class mailing permits are required to print
information about their circulation and print runs. Try this on for size:

=====
Incredible Hulk #427 Uncle Scrooge #291
-------------------- ------------------

Print Run: 275,775 * 118,180
262,100 ** 100,732

Subscriptions: 4,817 4,072
3,400 *** 4,194 @

Returns from Vendors: 106,958 **** 0 @@
105,475 0

Est. Direct Sales: 57,042 ***** 112,528 @@@
47,750 94,005

=====
Notes:

* - First number in each group is reported average for previous year (ending
October 1, 1994 for Hulk; September 28, 1994 for Scrooge). DC no
longer uses 2nd call, sidestepping this disclosure.

Additionally, with Hulk's change to "Deluxe Format", these figure
may no longer be accessible in future years.

** - Second number is of issue closest to filing date. Sales are typically
higher in the summer months and during crossovers, so this lower
number may not indicate slipping sales.

*** - Subscriptions are way down. Possible reason: the book has jumped to
"Deluxe Format", causing a higher price.

**** - Direct Market books are not returnable (except in rare cases). All
returns should be assumed to be from newsstands.

***** - "Print two copies per one sold on the newsstand" (figure supported
by Harper's Index: 57% of newsstand magazines go unsold). So the
calculation is PR - S - 2*RV.

@ - Note that Gladstone's subscriptions are on the rise. Could be caused by
recent "please subscribe ads" or the like.

@@ - Gladstone titles are not sold in returnable venues.

@@@ - Uncle Scrooge would appear to outsell Incredible Hulk by a two-to-one
margin. Possibly (probably) it is available in venues where Marvel
comics are not sold (reports are that Disney parks and stores are
not among such venues, however).

Additionally, these are sales which are not returnable. That does
not indicate actual customer purchase, just venue purchase from
the publisher/distributor. (I'll bet you find a lot more issues of
Hulk in the back-issue bins than issues of Uncle Scrooge, no?)
=====

Conclusion:

Unless something is very wrong in my assumptions, if I were Marvel, I would
be *very* concerned. This would seem to indicate that the Direct Market is
about 1/3 of Marvel's business, but that they are getting their butt kicked
in that same market.

Market share figures that we see should be looked at with skepticism: do they
refer to just the Direct Market? Are they volume or dollar based? Do they
include items other than comics, such as t-shirts, posters, etc.? Lists of
top-selling comics may also be suspect.

It would appear that the only way Marvel holds onto its market share is by
sheer volume of output (ie, by crowding other comics off the stands). On an
individual basis, the titles are not especially impressive (or even healthy).

Jim Drew
jrd at frame.com

Hi, folks.

DON ROSA is probably still recuperating from a deluge of private
mail I have sent him recently, but I thought I'd throw one more thing
into the ring: he referred to "teenage fanboy Duck-haters" as HERO's
readership. One thing I've learned is that fanboy <>= Duck-hater. What
it more often means is Duck-IGNORER -- people don't KNOW that the comics
are out there. I've attracted new readers myself by showing them my
favorite stories such as "Return to Xanadu," "Lost in the Andes,"
"Monarch of Medioka," etc. Many of those readers were superhero fans
who had simply never heard anything ABOUT Disney comics. There are a
lot of people who don't even know these comics exist. One girl who grew
up in Germany, loving Disney comics, met me in college as a superhero
fan. She had never seen an American Disney comic and thought that her
old-time favorites were a solely European phenomenon. I fixed that.

WHILE WE'RE DISCUSSING PEGLEG PETE it's an interesting fact to
note that Gottfredson never took to the later "Black Pete" name. All
the way through 1953 (Pete's last appearance in the MM strip) the
character is referred to as Pegleg Pete, even when he's wearing his
artificial second foot rather than leaving his pegleg obvious. Same is
true in Italy... to this day. In fact, "Pietro Gambadilegno"
(Wooden-leg Pete, I think -- am I right, Fabio?) was shortened to merely
"Gambadilegno" more recently.
The very first advertisement (1929) for the then-upcoming MM daily
strip predetermines its main characters as Mickey, Minnie, and Pete
("The Vile Villain"), but Pete is actually given a different name:
Terrible Tom. When he actually appeared in the strip, the
animated-cartoon version of his name was (luckily) substituted, and
stuck of course.
I think that the best stories with Pete are: "MM in the Foreign
Legion," "The Captive Castaways," "The Bar-None Ranch," "Island in the
Sky," Murry's "Ruby Eye of Homar Guy-Am" (1951) and "Westward Whoa"
(1953), and Scarpa's "Mystery of Tapiocus VI" and "MM in the Fourth
Dimension" (that last having not appeared in the States).

MARK SEMICH: Any sign of a package full of extremely unexciting
British Disney comics in your neck of the woods? Mailed it some time
back...

I have subscribed to this list since digest #11 or so, but
have only read a fraction of the messages, so please bear
with me if the following is well trodden ground. Since this
is my first posting, let's start with a brief introduction:
I am 27, a Danish citizen, and have been working with
computer graphics research in the US for the last 2 years
(first at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and
now at Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). My interest
in Disney comics is mainly nostalgic: In Denmark, all healthy
children are chewing Disney comics before they can digest
solid food, and I grew up surrounded by huge piles of duck
comics. In elementary school, my class had a "secret"
closet full of beaten-up comics that we would fill up as fast
our teachers could confiscate them, and after school we were
playing games like "comic-book sliding": A comic is opened
at the centerfold and placed on the floor; the objective is
then to run across the room and gratuitously slide in the book,
kicking the centerfold as high in the air as possible while
avoiding serious bodily harm (judged much the same way as figure
skating, by the way).

Anyway, the point is that Disney comics bring back a lot
of fond memories to me, much the same way as many Americans
appreciate Barbie dolls, baseball games, or trips to Disney
theme parks. Also, since I work with destructive beasts like
computers and computer scientists, Disney comics is the perfect
anti-thesis to my work. However, I have no interest whatsoever
in 99% of the synthetic and mass-produced juvenile junk that
has been printed since political correctness destroyed
Taliaferro's and Barks' ducks and Gottfredson's mice (in 1939,
1954-55, and around 1942 respectively), but love the early
and unpolished toons and stories.

Nisse Krenchel wrote:
---------------------

> CB drew some 6,700 pages of comic book artwork between 1946
> and 1969. But today only around 200 of those pages exist. What
> happened to the remainder, and which are the surviving
> originals?

Interesting question. Almost all original Barks art I have seen
has been Uncle Scrooge or WDCS pages from after 1964. The only
exceptions I know of are pages that were rejected by the
publishers around 1952-53 ("Back to the Klondyke(sp?)", "Trick
or Treat" ...) and the Christmas story from the mid 1940s).
I would guess that all the rejected pages were returned to
Barks, who then passed some of them on to his friends (at
least according to Mike Barrier's book on Barks). It would be
fun if any of the lost Barks' stories would someday turn up
in a garage sale :P. Does anyone know whether Western started
returning the art to Barks around 1965, or another reason why
art from the last 2-3 years survived? Could this have something
to do with the change from Dell to Gold Key around that time?

David Gerstein wrote:
---------------------

> [interesting stuff about Pegleg Pete] and
> The very first advertisement (1929) for the then-upcoming
> MM daily strip predetermines its main characters as Mickey,
> Minnie, and Pete ("The Vile Villain").

I never heard of this ad before and don't understand why it
featured Pete, as he did not appear for the first many weeks?
Btw., Comic Buyer's Guide had an article on supposedly the
first MM drawing ever, which Steve Geppi donated to a museum.
The museum also has the original script to the "Plane Crazy"
short, which is considered to be the first MM story.
Btw., my own favorite Pete story is "MM in Death Valley"
which I think was the first story to demonstrate Gottfredson's
genius for the long, wild adventure stories that would define
his career. I think it can best be compared to Barks' "Frozen
Gold", as this was _his_ first succesful longer story, and
I have always liked these two stories a lot for sentimental
reasons.

- Hans

(The ex-Danish now-out-of-the-closet somewhat American duck geek.)

HARRY: Gladstone commissioned Ulrich's "King Scrooge" redraw
themselves, in 1988. He did the job and sent it to them. They liked
it, but decided to send it back to him for a few changes. Before
they did so, they paid him for half a page, then Xeroxed the half-page
(and it ALONE!) for use in a CBL article they were then preparing.
They then sent back to him all other material he'd sent them.
At this point, Schroder became disappointed with the story as a
whole, so much so that he decided he didn't want it to be published.
He told Gladstone he had destroyed the pages (!)
This information appeared in UNCLE SCROOGE 255 in response to a
letter I had written to Bob Foster. I asked naively why if Gladstone
never published the thing, why Disney couldn't? And that was the
response. John has since confirmed it as correct.
John and I can't really believe that the guy actually destroyed
his work, but in any event, the situation's in a stalemate now. How
do you tell an artist, "We don't believe you destroyed the pages.
Can't you send them to us, huh?"
All we may ever see of that story is the four panels in CBL Set
V. Unless Daan Jippes gives it a shot.

David Gerstein
<9475609 at arran.sms.ed.ac.uk>