Keskustelujen arkisto

After having written something about the first two stories in the
latest Norwegian duck magazine, I decided to put this on the top
of the letter. It's _not_ meant as a disclaimer. I'm a Norwegian,
and don't feel the need to put in disclaimers.
I did hope it wouldn't happen, but we've already seen that people
"outside" this list have been taking information from it, and used
it against it's members. I have no reason to think, though, that
anyone would use anything I write on this list against me, and that
is not the reason why I write this.

Daniel (the Dutch one) brought up the question about what to write
in a description of a story. The description could possibly hurt
the writer, and since there are several writers on this list now,
the possibility is there to write something not very nice about
their work. Therefore I'll just make sure that everyone knows that
this is only my personal view of the stories. I've read most of
the Disney stories that have ever been made, so I think I have
quite a lot of material to compare a new story to. It's still
only my personal view. I and David G. have often disagreed about
the qualities of a story.

When I first started to write these reviews, there were only a
couple of writers on this list. It was, and I guess it somehow
still is, a quite closed medium. At that time it was no problem
in describing a story as boring or just bad, or anything. As far
as I remember, I was describing a story by Gilbert as quite bad,
just before he came on the list.
I have been wondering a bit of what I should do, since I didn't
want to stop writing these reviews. I came to the conclusion that
if I wanted to tell people when they are doing something good, I
should also tell them when they are doing something bad (in which
case it of course is something _I_ don't like, and that applies
to the good stories too, of course). That way I would at least be
sure that people would believe me when I was telling them something.

Donald Duck & Co #37 1995
-------------------------

- Cover: D11972
Donald has painted a portrait of Daisy's hat so it looks like
a stilleben.

- Donald Duck, D94111, 10 pages, art by Vicar.
Scrooge gives Donald a new job, as a pencil sharpener. Well,
he wants a better job, and he gets one. His first mission is to
collect some money that a snobby club owns Scrooge. It's a dream of
Donald to become a member of this club, so he looks forward to meet
the people there. The members do not want to pay the bill, and when
they discover that Donald is Scrooge's nephew, they make him a member,
with a nice title (sounds like one of those ridiculous, er, proud
JWW titles). With Scrooge's nephew as a member, they believe Scrooge
will forget the bill. After a while, a few minutes actually, the other
members are quite disgusted by Donald's manners. They throw him out
of the window at the same time as Scrooge is coming to look for him.
Donald lands safely on Scrooge. Then they trow an old coin to Scrooge
and, while laughing, they tell him that that is all they are willing
to pay. Donald and Scrooge recognize the coin as a valuable such one,
and tell the members that they have paid the rent for twenty years
into the future. Scrooge then gives Donald a high position -- as a
window cleaner.
A good story. What's really making it good is all the gags in
the dialogue. The translator must have done a really good job (I
haven't read the original script). It doesn't seem, though, that the
writer has the same idea of how Scrooge looks upon money as Don Rosa,
but even if I prefer Don's view, I won't criticize this writer's view.
The art is very good. Seems like Vicar liked the story too.

- Mickey Mouse, D94097, 6 pages.
Mickey and Goofy are hired as, er, what's the word... you
know such people in Bay Watch who look after the people on the
beach. Anyway, they are hired since no one else applied. I wonder
if the same could be the case for the writer. It's about some
stupid guy who, for no apparent reason, wants to make trouble for
Mickey and Goofy.

- Grandma Duck, D92550, 2 pages.
Gus Goose wants a tractor to do the job for him, and he
actually manage to get Grandma to buy one. While Gus is looking
at the luxury of the machines, Grandma is looking at the prices.
At last she finds one she likes. Its a huge steam machine to which
Gus must supply the fuel -- wood.
A nice little story, and the art is good. The machine in the
last panel (half page) looks great.

- Donald Duck, H8580, 10 pages, art by Ben Verhagen (did he write
it too?).
HDL are playing knights (again :-). They make Donald very
upset. He meets Gyro who lends him a mirror that can make people
do anything you tell them (nothing new so far, but just wait).
Donald then goes on a trip with HDL. He's looking for a spot
where there has never been any war. If HDL disagree, he uses the
mirror. After a while they come to a nice place, and HDL tell
about a big war that took place there. Donald gets furious, but
then HDL tell him that there is some gold hidden there. They look
for it, but don't find anything. Then Donald gets the idea of
hypnotizing himself to believe that he was there at the same
place in 1623, when the battle took place. Donald can see
everything that happened there in 1623, and the boys can see
Donald, who is acting quite strange. In 1623, Donald takes off
his own clothes, and puts on some armour. In 1985 (the code) he
takes of his own clothes, and then walks around naked. A knight
in Donald's "world" shows up to be a forest ranger, who doesn't
want people to walk around naked in his forest. Anyway, Donald
has found out where the gold was hidden, and starts to dig. A
water well suddenly blows (or whatever it does) out of the ground,
and on the top of it, invisible for anyone who see the water,
is a small chest.
A very clever story, and very good art.

- Mickey Mouse, D93303, 8+ pages, story by Janet Gilbert, art
by Ferioli.
A bottle of "rubber serum" is stolen from a friend of
Mickey. This friend is an inventor. He's got the idea from a
comic about some guy called Rubber Sam (do I sense some super
hero comic here?). The serum makes anything, included cats, and
as we'll later see, mice, get some "rubbery" concistence.
It was stolen by The Red Bat (was that his name?), who's using
it on a big building in, well, Duckburg, of course. He'll use
it more, if he doesn't get a lot of money. Mickey wants to take
the serum back from the bat, and after having got the serum
spilled over himself, he can actually get in through the key-
hole.
Very good! This is really something new. And the art is
fantastic. I don't think I've seen anything this good by Ferioli
before, and I can't remember having seen anything bad by him.
You must have done a good job too, Erik :-)

- Donald Duck, KF5.15.49, one page, Bob Karp, Al Taliaferro.

Except for the first Mickey story, this was a very good issue.
These reviews might not all be as long as this one...

Jorgen

>>- Cover: D11972
>> Donald has painted a portrait of Daisy's hat so it looks like
>> a stilleben.

Er...in English that's a still life.

>>Mickey Mouse, D94097, 6 pages.
>> Mickey and Goofy are hired as, er, what's the word... you
>>know such people in Bay Watch who look after the people on the
>>beach.

Oh, lifeguards.

>>Anyway, they are hired since no one else applied. I wonder
>>if the same could be the case for the writer. It's about some
>>stupid guy who, for no apparent reason, wants to make trouble for
>>Mickey and Goofy.

I believe the writer was Per Erik Hedman, who writes a _lot_ of
Mouse and Duck six- and ten-pagers. He's Swedish.

--Dwight Decker

DON:
"in a very complex scene . . . Gladstone will
simply color everything one color since it's too difficult to do it all by
hand. At Egmont where it's all done on computer, they simply blow that area
up and color it at a larger scale"

I was under the impression that the Gladstone coloring was done by
computer. I thought how else could they do such a fine job. As for the
color washes over tiny detailed pictures, I thought that was because the
computer just couldn't handle the detail. I guess I had it backwards.

-- Wes

"But, Mickey! It's SUICIDE! We'll be KILLED! How'll we ever land without
wheels?" -- Captain Doberman

RAUL:
> How would anyone feel about posting Disney drawings on the list for the
> members to collect?

It is not a good idea to post binary files to the list. I (and a lot of
others, I think) wouldn't be able to convert these files to anything
usable. So it would only enlarge the amount of traffic needlessly.

Please send things like that in private mail only.

--Harry.

P.S. JO/RGEN: That Ben Verhagen story "Return to the Spanish" (H 8580)
was written by someone else. I don't know who, but maybe it was Evert
Geradts, or (less likely) Jan Kruse.

Hello boys.

I've been in the lurking mode for a while, but now I feel the need to throw
my 2 cents coin in.

As a start, welcome aboard to Francesco (Frank) and Leonardo. It is a
pleasure to see that the Italian community is growing bigger and bigger...

(As a side note: Frank wrote

>At that time my family moved to Waterloo, Belgium. As a sort of
>compensation for having left all my schoolfriends behind, I was granted a
>subscription to Topolino. A couple of years later this was stopped, on
>the grounds that I was a grown-up and I was not supposed to have that
>childish passion for comics, and all that sort of rubbish (sounds
>familiar to you? I hope not...).

Of course it sounds familiar. Italian parents must have had a common
dislike for comics in the Seventies. And yes, also many of my comics were
thrown away...)

About Rota: yes, he stopped writing Disney stories after Mondadori lost its
licensing. He started again some years ago, working directly for Egmont
(and part of this stuff has been reprinted in Mega Almanacco). The Zio
paperone covers are the first things he has done explicitly for
Disney-Italy but, as far as I know, there are also some longer stories that
should appear in the next year.

About Jerry Siegel: I think that he usually sent plots rather than scripts,
and that those were elaborate here in Italy by the Mondadori bullpen
authors. And no, I think nothing of his works ever appeared in America.

About CWDNS: the current issue is 235, and no, they are never reprinted.
The ood-number CWDNS contained reprints of CWD until issue 69. Only 34 out
of 71: the collectors market is simply too happy of this.

About Perego. Frank wrote:

>I agree, Perego's art is ugly. Not only his glue, but his full-length
>stories too. He could take beautiful scripts from, say, Rodolfo
>Cimino, and turn them into something you wouldn't want to read :-( The
>worst thing though is not his glue (you just skip it) or his stories,
>but the panels he used to draw to join the episodes of the same story
>by someone else! The longer (>30 pages) stories were normally
>published in two or three weekly installments in Topolino; when
>reprinted in the CWDs, the editor (curse on him, whoever he was)
>thought it was a good idea to pretend that the stories had never been
>splitted in the first place, so they consistently removed the opening
>page from the 2nd and subsequent installments, butchered the last few
>panels of the 1st to n-1th installments and stitched the lot together
>with some Perego junk... Arghhh!
>
>Having said all this, I think it's hard to say that Perego is the
>worst Disney comics artist ever. There's no lower bound, believe me,
>and there are several I consider even worse (Giancarlo Gatti to name
>one...)

Well, poor Gatti... :-) Anyhow, we already butchered Perego some time ago.
Let us give him some rest! :-) Note also that sometimes the opening (of the
second installment) and closing (of the first one) pages were sometimes
redrawn by the same artist who did the story. I have a nice original
closing page by Scarpa from Paperin Fracasssa, and it has a new piece of
art (drawn by Scarpa) glued on the old one who had the caption closing the
installment.

About David:

> So go on, Fabio, buy a thousand copies, tell Disney Italy why
>you did it, and then they'll put my stories into the ZIO PAPERONE with
>Rosa and Rota and Jippes ;-) ;-) ;-)

I'll do that, my dear friend. I hope the next Italian tour Disney Italy
organizes will be the one for you ;-).
Btw, any plan for coming back to Old Europe. And moreover: how many dollars
I still owe you for the S.Diego Con? I do not remember...

And now, for something completely different, let me go back to my thesis.

Bye for now,

Fabio (still appreciating Dorfman and Mittelart... :-)

================================================================
Fabio Gadducci Dip. di Informatica
Home: +39-50-541725 Universita` di Pisa
Off.: +39-50-887268 Corso Italia 40, 56100 PISA (ITALY)
FAX: +39-50-887226 E-mail:gadducci at di.unipi.it
http://www.di.unipi.it/~gadducci/gadducci.html
================================================================

Hi,
I am away until October 1th. This is an automatic reply.
Your message has been saved in my mailbox; I'll read it when
I'm back.

-- Behr de Ruiter

GER MC NAMARA:

> please un-subscribe us immediately.

For unsubscription there's a special adress:

disney-comics-request at minsk.docs.uu.se

PER:

Not so long ago we all discussed about how we could solve the problem
of unsubscriptions being sent to the club. There were several
solutions discussed (a name-change, Smart-list, two way subscribing).

Do you already have a descision about which of these solutions will
be chosen? Or have you already told us about it? (I can't remember
this at the moment.)

Greetings,

--- Daniel

WES:
No, Gladstone colors the comics in the old fashioned way... but they
send those guides to some coloring-company who converts that to the pretyy
computer coloring. That's an oversimplified version coming from me, who
don't really know anything about that stuff. But Gladstone does not color
the stuff ON a computer. At Egmont, they scan the original art into a
computer first off, then toss the originals in a vault, after which
everything else, coloring, lettering, etc., is all done on that computer
disc. They simply send discs to their publishing branches. When Gladstone
wants to reprint one of the stories, they hafta make a B&W photostat to send
Gladstone (and sometimes the stats are bad, as with the last episode of my
"Lo$" series, chapter X. UGH -- that looked awful!).

RAUL:
You say you understand that the drawings belong to the artists.
That's how I and most of the rest of the planet understands it as well, but
that's not how Disney understands it, and that's the understanderer what counts.