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WILMER
Actually Della was Al Taliaferro's aunt - I checked another time: Adolph Hirt,
brother to Al's mother MaymeTaliaferro (born Hirt), moved from
Montrose, Colorado - which was the home of the Hirt-family - to
Glendale, Cal. where he lived with his wife Della and family.
Al Taliaferro's father, Lucius, who was married to Maymem, also lived at first
in Montrose and moved to California, when Al was 13 (1918). The
Taliferro-family stayed at first with the Hirts before they got their
first home...
I dont know, if Al was at friendly terms with Della, nor do I know,
if she had obnoxious children. But what I do know is that Al had a
sister called Genevieve, who called him "Buster"... The name
"Dumbella" was chosen by the animation-crew of "Donald's Nephews".
(They didn't intend to follow Al's strip-version tightly anyway - in the first draft
they optioned for any number of nephews between 2 and 6! I have a
copy of this draft).
Al simply loved to put his family in his Donald-strips: Daisy acted a
lot like Al's wife Lucy (especially all the fuss with her hats); Grandma Duck was
modelled 1:1 after Lucy's mother, Donnie M. Wheaton, who lived on a farm was
very old-fashioned and even had the same hair-do as Grandma (and stayed with
the Taliaferros during the birth of Al's first child - the same time, she first
appeared in the strip!); many of the adventures with Borneworthy
(then called Bolivar) were based on true-live experience with the
Taliaferro-family-dog George McTavish (a Scott Terrier); Donald's car
was based on a car of one of Al's friends; the first Junior
Woodchuck-strips and HDL-hiking trips were based on Al's forest
outings and his involvement with local Boy Scouts... and so on, and
so forth.
I just wrote his biography and it is full of stuff like this... I
think from there stems also the dislike of Carl Barks, Al Taliaferro
had and Lucy still has: the T's had the feeling, Barks (and others)
"stole" their family and messed with them. But I better stop here or
I end up posting my whole Taliaferro-chapter here...

On a different note:
In the end-70ies, early 80ies there was a series of Goofy-albums in
German ("Das grosse Goofy-Album"), featuring Goofy (and Mickey and
cast) as famous people from history or literature: in the first one he was
Leonardo da Vinci, he then acted as King Midas, Galileo Galilei,
Pasteur, Eiffel, Franklin, Mozart, Bach, Strauss, Herkules, Odysseus,
Gutenberg, Viktor van Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, Casanova, Newton....
all together 30 albums in German. I suppose the origin of this stories
is Italy. Does anybody know more about them (who when why how many?)
It was incredible art-work: split-panels, panels in panels in panels, people
sitting on panel-borders, splash-pages with ongoing plot (Goofy descending
a staircase talking to micky: 3 Goofys 1 staircase!) ), an innumerable funny
background details - toothbrushes and tin-cans as hieroglyphes in the
Tutanchamun-story, blenders an other kitchen-equipment in the fantastic
machines of Dr. Frankenstein, "One Way"-signs in Venice channels...
reminding a lot of MAD-type gags.
I see these books a one of the most creative comics-works ever in regard of the
use of all the possibilities of the medium, and believe me, I have seen a lot...
Any information about this will be appreciated...

Thanks

Harald

(Numbers I dug up - most of them have none, at least visible: Mickey
Polo S-76179, Wilhelm "Goofy" Tell S-80135, Galileo "Goofy" Galilei
S-76159, Goofy Frankenstein S-78212, Goofy Tutanchamun S-78096)

Harald

Since Robert D. is obviously too afraid of potential maniacal killers
lurking on this mailing list, I suggest we avoid any sort of flames
against him (her? How can we know for sure?). The surest way to do this
is to simply not reply to any of his messages in a direct manner.

I don't know what anyone on this list looks like, save for 2 individuals
beside myself. Yet, I enjoy reading the comments of folks who are not
ashamed to be identified, whether I agree with them or not. Though I
doubt that Robert D.'s name on his birth certificate matches what he
claims to be his "real name," I cannot prove this to be true.
Therefore, I'll always consider him Robert D., even if I should actually
meet him or be introduced to him as someone with a longer last name.

I consider it a special treat to have learned that someone is going
through life with a name so simple and easy to remember. I usually have
trouble recalling the names of folks I've met face to face, but I will
never forget Robert D., the person with the shortest last name in the
history of man.

I read this list faithfully. I post to it seldom. After this post most
will probably be glad to see me go back into hiding, but I just wanted
to let it be known that the varying viewpoints expressed about comics
(particularly Duck stories) have always struck me as fair, level-headed
and inciteful. Many people do take their fiction too seriously (Star
Trek fans spring quickly to mind), but a lot of us share the same view
as Robert D. about the real place such fantasies hold in the Big
Picture.

Still, I wonder how many would really care to hear the solution to the
greater ills that Mr. (Ms.?) D. speaks of. (Note the preposition at
the end of the sentence, considered grammatically correct since the late
60's. Winston Churchill was once criticized for ending his sentences
with prepositions, and he responded quickly with, "That's the sort of
useless criticism up with which we will not put.") I have never used a
list about comics as a sounding board for my views about Biblical
prophecy or God's Kingdom, even though I know how important it is to
make everyone aware of same. That's what my door-to-door preaching work
is for, where I actually introduce myself by full name, my face in full
view. I consider the message I bear important enough to risk having
been physically thrown off porches and shot at twice. I would never
consider my views to be of any worth at all if I were fearful of the
wrath they might incur.

What if Donald, impetuous as he is, were the kind of character who poked
his nose in, spouted off, then ducked for the cover of fearful
anonymity? I doubt many would find him a very likeable subject for a
series of adventure stories.

Sorry about the tirade. It probably serves no real purpose on this
list. I just don';t like seeing friends verbally assaulted by sneak
thieves.

MIKE:
"The newly printed MM story was good, too!" you tell me. "Who
was Pete's girlfriend? Has she actually been introduced before?"
Gulp! I'm not sure what story you're referring to, Mike. Do
you mean one of my first two, both of which Egmont just published?
But... but... neither "Digging Up Trouble" nor "The Egg Collector"
included Pete, let alone his girlfriend.
Romano Scarpa, by the way, did give Pete a girlfriend, a
female feline con-artist who was just as fat as her fiancee. Her name
is Trudy, methinks. She's got brown fur aside from her face. Looks
basically like a female Pete. Maybe some Egmont writer decided to use
her? I know I haven't seen the story you refer to. (The American TV
series "Goof Troop" gives Pete a wife, but she's completely different,
quite slim with a mop of hair on top that conceals her ears and makes
it hard to tell what species she's supposed to be... although she must
be a cat, since their kids are both cats. I don't regard this series
as canonical at all.)
In the original strip, Pete was a bachelor and quite
interested in Minnie, which irritated her no end. Sylvester Shyster
was also in love with Minnie, and this was the only issue that could
set Shyster and Pete (who usually obeyed Shyster unquestioningly) at
each other's throats.

HARALD:
Gladstone uses the Goofy stories you refer to fairly
frequently. Until recently they have been appearing in 3-part
installments in the DONALD AND MICKEY comics from Gladstone. Now
they're appearing in WALT DISNEY GIANT in one part, with one
apparently to be published each year.
The stories were produced by the Walt Disney Studio and the
Jaime Diaz artists in the 1970s and 1980s. They are (IMHO) sadly
fairly disappointing in English, because the characters don't speak
with their usual voices (Goofy talks like a normal person, for
instance) and aren't necessarily given roles that are in-character.
The German translations I've seen fixed this, but the originals have
some flaws, unfortunately. They work better in one part than in
three, BTW. They have no real climaxes so serializing them doesn't
really seem to make a lot of sense.
For the record, these are the ones they used:
"A Very Goofy King Midas" in DM 20 (all in one part)
"Don't Call Me Tut!" (Goofy King Tut) in DM 23-25
"Goofy King Arthur" in DM 28-30
"Mickey Aladdin" in DDMM 1-3
"The Mysterious Stranger" (Goofy Invisible Man) in WDG 4
Disney Comics (1990) also used:
"Goofy Frankenstein" in GOOFY ADVENTURES 1-2 (slightly
condensed; this is undoubtedly the best of the lot)
"Goofy Da Vinci" in GA 14 (just a 12-page piece of the
originally-longer story, I think)

IF ANYONE
can get me some British or German copies of my first two
Mickey stories which have been published in the last two weeks (D93497
and D94108) I'd be very, very glad. (Whoever can do it, send a
message to the digest, so no one else wastes time looking after you've
found them.)

David Gerstein
<(Email removed)>

Hi again!

Harald Strindberg wrote:

<<Actually Della was Al Taliaferro's aunt - I checked another time: Adolph
Hirt, brother to Al's mother Mayme Taliaferro (born Hirt), moved from
Montrose, Colorado - which was the home of the Hirt-family...>>

Would you know if that makes Taliaferro a relative of the musician, Al
Hirt ("Music to Watch Girls Go By," and others)? It's not exactly a common
name...

<<Al simply loved to put his family in his Donald-strips... I think from
there stems also the dislike of Carl Barks, Al Taliaferro had and Lucy still
has: the T's had the feeling, Barks (and others) "stole" their family and
messed with them. But I better stop here or I end up posting my whole
Taliaferro-chapter here...>>

As someone who loves Barks' work but has criticized the attitudes of
Mike Barrier and others toward other Disney comics creators ("Barks is great,
nobody else is even worth bothering to mention...), I can sympathize. Not
that he was the first or only individual creator to see his own creative work
subsumed almost entirely into the Disney monolith, but he certainly deserves
credit for creating the Nephews and Grandma (and Daisy too?).

<<In the end-70ies, early 80ies there was a series of Goofy-albums in German
("Das grosse Goofy-Album"), featuring Goofy (and Mickey and cast) as famous
people from history or literature...>>

Much of that material first appeared in America in the Disney Comics
title "Goofy Adventures," and has subsequently been reprinted in Gladstone's
"Donald and Mickey." Gladstone has credited it to "the Jamie Diaz studio,"
though I confess I don't know anything else about Jamie Diaz, or even what
country his studio is in (I seem to recall Argentina or Brazil). It's very
different and enjoyable, though the stories have had a mixed reception in
America...I think "Goofy Adventures" was the first Disney Comics
cancellation.

David Gerstein:

Something I just posted on our other shared Internet group, the Ozzy
Digest reminded me that Gladstone's published several Disney stories by
George Beal. Could this be the same George Beal I interviewed in 1973, a
long-time writer for and editor of British comics? (Not to mention a book
collector who gave me a chance to borrow and read for the first time a couple
of Oz books by Ruth Plumly Thompson...) Are you in touch with him, or was all
his work done directly for Egmont?

Don Rosa:

Something else occurred to me in reading the last Digest. To what
extent do the Disney editors insist on following established (by them)
versions of major figures of myth and legend?
As it happens, possibly inspired by your own comments, I've just rented
and seen (for the first time) Disney's 1963 feature, THE SWORD IN THE STONE.
Quite a nice little movie, if not exactly Disney's finest hour (I wasn't
expecting the Sherman brothers' songs to be up there with their score for
MARY POPPINS, but they weren't even as catchy as "The Gnome-Mobile...").
What's most intriguing is that it neatly fits into the same continuity as
that very different Arthurian musical, CAMELOT (the movies were based on
different sections of T.H. White's THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING). But will you be
expected to follow that version of Arthur and Merlin if you do an Arthurian
story with the Disney characters? At least some of the comics seem to put
them in the same universe: Gladstone alone has reprinted several stories
teaming Mad Madam Mim with the Beagle Boys, which would seem to dictate a
very different approach from the one you used in "Knighttime."
And how seriously do you take setting your Duck stories in the
mid-'50's? I remember at least one giving Scrooge a surveillance satellite!
Granted that Barks occasionally showed Duckburg as having advanced
technology, even space stations, before the '50's were out, but you've said
you didn't care for that, either. (I remember a reprint of "The Looney Lunar
Gold Rush" in the '70's referred to "another" moon landing, and looked as if
it had been relettered from the first--even though it wouldn't have been the
first even in Barks' stories, since he'd sent Donald to the moon back in the
'40's...) "The Treasure of Croesus" a couple of minor anachronisms (like a
ZIP code on a package) as well, but nothing that couldn't be explained. At
that, Disney seems to have a few characters who invite such things, anyway:
Merlin in THE SWORD IN THE STONE being the first (didn't T.H. White explain
that he aged backwards?), along with the Genie in ALADDIN.

Time to go!

Rich Morrissey

Harald (I hope I spelled that right, pardon if I didn't) wrote\\
>I just wrote his biography and it is full of stuff like this... I

So, how much of Donald Duck did Al T. actually write? I thought Bob Karp
wrote most of these?\
I know that Al T. did a few comic book stories for Jim Davis and the
Sangor Shop, did he write any of those?
And speaking of writers, Jerry Siegel wrote a Jr Woodchucks story which
appeared in the american comics back in 1972. It's the backup story in #16.
I take it that that's not widely known? (I haven't seen the Disney
Gold key FTP).
Steven Rowe

ARTHUR
I asked a local dealer and he pointed me to the "General German Comics
Collector Price Guide", in which I found the following information:
Yes, there have been "Austrian" Disney-Comics, if only for a short
time: "Micky Maus" the main German Disney magazine (weekly, circ.
around 1 Million) had during the 80ies a period, where the Austrian issues
appeared a) under the label EGMONT instead of EHAPA (Ehapa is a 100%
daughter of Egmont but uses this name in G. because it has been known for
more than 40 years) b) had different ads and c) some had different covers
(but it doesn't say, if air-brushed. a) is known for sure of the
issues 35/1984 through 33/198; c) is known for sure for number
33/1988, but there are no indexes.
There are at least two more "Austrian" Disney-Comics:
The German "Minnie"-Magazine (comics and infos for girls) was created
in Austria by a subsidiary printing house, not owned by Egmont. I
believe it even featured new art created in Austria. But rights have
returned now to Germany/Ehapa/Egmont, and so has the content.
On the other hand there have been Disney-comics in Austrian
youth-magazines as early as the 1930ies - one famous example is the
magazine "Schmetterling" (Butterfly), that featured "The Wise Little
Hen" in 1938 - Donald was then called "Emmerich"...

RE: Fethry
Does anybody know the German name of this character? I'm unsure as of
whom you speak... Is he the slightly dumb guy in pink sweater and cap
(both knitted), who appears as another cousin of Donald, and
sometimes works for $crooge? If so his name is "Dussel Duck" in
German (Dussel being a friendly version of "idiot" - Dumbhead Duck or
something like that)

Rich - Re: Barks in German
Of course the interview was conducted in English - but I transcribed
it from the English tape directly to German written text, as I have
done with other interviews (e.g. Will Eisner). Sorry. I dont suppose
somebody is interested in transcribing my tape? it's a nice interview
but no sensation. And I'm unsure as of anybody, who was not present,
could hear enough to do the work... So I will start slipping in
original remarks on this page for the time being.

Age of HDL
Who knows? You can join the Scouts at an earlier age then 8 in
Austria, so who knows how it is on Stella Anais (or something like
that, as the German "Donaldisten" refer to the Duck-World).
Furthermore there has been a very good and very disrespectful painting of the
grown Ducks by a Austrian political cartoonist called Manfred Deix, who has a
very "disgusting" underground-kind of style, but yet very artistic,
and who is very popular in Austria and Germany. It shows for ex.
Donald and Daisy "in action", and HDL as very fat Hooligan-like
Teenagers. It was printed in "profil" a "Time"-type magazine as
a comment to (I believe) Donalds 50th birthday.
There are also two famous German Books called "Die Ducks -
Psychogramm einer Sippe" by Grobian Gans (that is: The Ducks - Ps.
of a Clan by Ruffian Goose) and "Das wahre Leben des Donald D." by
Martin S. Gans ("The True Life of D.D."), who deal ironically with
the "real-life" implications of the Duck-family.

Re: Changing of the Barks
Just a short footnote: Dr. Erika Fuch, who translated the
Disney-material from 1951 on to German, and continues to do so (now
in her eighties) at least part time (as for ex. the latest
Barks-story), created a very distinctive style of her own, that sets
apart all Disney-titles and esp. Barks-stories from any other comic printed
in German. This accounts for the incredible success of Donald and Carl
in Germany, but of course, also made some vital changes compared
to the original.
Gain some - lose some...

Harald Havas
---Harald Havas (Email removed)

Mikko wrote:
> Then I got Email response from Janet Gilbert

So Janet is still a member of this list? Last thing I heard was
that she quit right before I made the "Gilbert-J" and "Gilbert-MT"
index files available on ftp.

In case you've been away: welcome back, Janet!

--Harry.

CAREY:
>> The CB Library of DD Adventures in Color: 1-5, 7-8, 10-13, 15-
> As far as I can see, the database for the CB Library of DD Adventures
> in Color is complete up through issue 22.

So the info in the database (which I guessed from advertisements
etc.) is accurate. Thanks for the info!

Also thanks to DAVID who sent me the contents of some of the
missing issues, and to ARTHUR who offered to index the rest.
I'll send you a list of missing issues, Arthur!

GAUTE:

> my question was which was Fethry's very FIRST appearance?
I have two stories (from the Disney Studios, made in 1963) that are
candidate for the introduction of Fethry. I don't know the codes of
those stories, but here are the descriptions:

- Fethry makes a coat for Donald [no cat yet; FE arrives by train]
(11 pages, published in Dutch DD 64-46)

- A new way of life
(published in Dutch DD 65-48. I only have the 1st page of this
story)

Both stories were drawn by Hubbard. Since neither of them
was the first story *published* in Holland, I can only guess
which one was first. The translation would hide the introduction
of Fethry, because he was already introduced in an earlier
print of a later story...

> Why not enter first apperances into your character database?

Yes, that's (along with three dozen other things) on my "to do"
list for the database.

> The database is impressive but confusing (to me) to navigate. There is a lot
> of question marks around, I take it you haven't got copies of these issues

That's right. If a Western issue is indexed like this: "W BLAH 1-?1",
"W BLAH 1-?2" etc. then it means the issue is not indexed itself,
but the information is obtained from reprints of the stories, or from
partial indexes like a Carl Barks index.

> isn't it better to wait for the great Beccatini's volume on Western
> comics to appear?

I think you mean Gold Key/Whitman (Dell was also Western).
We could wait, but I'm not that patient (and it might take a while
before the book is finished)...
Also, I like to have *every* information about Disney comics
(well, *almost* every) in the Database. Even very incomplete
information. For instance, we can produce a *complete* Carl
Barks index, though some of the issues that reprint Barks stories
have not been indexed yet.

If you have suggestions to improve the Database layout and make
it less confusing to navigate, please tell me!

--Harry.