Keskustelujen arkisto

WILMER:
> We know that the ducklings came to live with Donald after Della's
> husband suffered an unfortunate accident in which a firecracker
> was detonated underneath the chair in which he was sitting. Surely
> neither Huey, Dewey, nor Louie would perform such a mean act of
> explosive sabotage!

Why not? Can't you remember that wonderful Barks short story where
some silly old professor of pedagogy tells Donald that he should let
their nephews do whatever they feel like doing? Oh yes, the one where
three infernal HDL kept on changing thier minds about their preferred
toys, driving Donald crazy. And remember the end of that story? :-)

By the way, thanks to AMAZING/WONDERFUL/BRILLIANT Fossati index (which
I consider the best Barks index yet, especially with its "concepts"
index at the back of the book), now online at
http://www.alpcom.it/fumetti/mvbarks.htm thanks to Gianfranco Goria
and Anonima Fumetti (great job Gianfranco!), I can give you an exact
reference to the story: WDCS 92, 5/1948.

WONDERFUL WEB SITES I VISITED RECENTLY:

DAVID:
I've recently visited your site and admired the new look: the
excellent "carpet of comics" background, very cute and well calibrated
in terms of low contrast; the frames and so on. Well done!
Beautiful. I was really impressed. It used to be good, it's now even better.

DAN/DON:
The Life of $crooge is a treat. It's so beautiful and packed with
useful and interesting information that I've printed out all the pages
and collected them in a spiral-bound booklet. (Mostly because it takes
me around 5 minutes per page to fetch them from the other side of the
fat pipe...)

GIANFRANCO:
Every time I come to Anonima Fumetti I find tons of new stuff. How do
you manage that? You've found a secret for expanding days to 48 hours?
:-) Brilliant stuff! But if you allow me some constructive criticism,
it's now becoming so big that it's hard to find what one wants. I
was after the Barks index for my reply above, I knew it was in there
because I had visited it just this week, but still it took me 20
minutes to find out where it was! Perhaps you might plan some form of
non-graphical, easily searchable, single-page roadmap of your whole
site.

HENRI:
I keep longing for the day when I'll have the right combination of
plug-ins to view your tour, which sounds promising... This week's
netscape comes with quicktime so I thought I was on, but no, I'm still
missing some extension or other :-)

Frank (Filologo Disneyano) http://www.cam-orl.co.uk/~fms

Gianfranco Goria - Anonima Fumetti - Italian Cartoonists Society
I don't believe that Janet Gilbert is in this mailing list anymore.
She's still on-line, because she's running her husband's Mr.Monster list.
You might e-mail her directly.

Donald D. Markstein
So where can you find a copy of "The Ballad of Eskimo Nell"? Could you
e-mail me a copy?
Robert Service, besides his Yukon poems also wrote a vast amount of WWI
poems. Oddly enough, you can buy a compact disc of Country Joe McDonald
reciting/singing Service's WWI poems (War, War, War). I too enhoy Service.

David Gerstein: Congratulations on (soon) graduating college. Now you can
go out and get a real job!
I'm also glad that you will be able to keep your Felix (and other) page
alive for awhile.

Nils Lid Hjort :
The Barney Bears were written by Gil Turner, who later begain drawing
them as well. I recall seeing comments from Barks, saying that of all the
stories he drew but didn't write, he liked Turner's. He was a moonlighting
cartoon animator/director. He did comic books from c1944 until his death.

Harry Fluks:
>> But I don't know the exact backgrounds of "OS"/"FC". Is there any
other reason for preferring OS to FC (or FCC)?<<

This takes some comics fandom history. Let me give the short version.
The first 100 "issues" carried the words "Four Color" on the title. When
Don and Maggie Thompson come up with their list of all the comics in this
series, circa 1965, they called all of them Four Color. There was a brief
(c1962-70), of calling some of them "color" comics, but basicaly for the last
20-25 years USA fandom has called all 1350 issues as 'Four Colors". Since
issue #102, the only identifing marks were "OS" on the splash page.
The reason I and (a few?) other renegades perfer OS, is because that is
what it says on the book. I recall that Western Publishing also refered to
them as OS (or One Shot).

Best Steven Rowe

Most of you will already know that Don Rosa will be on a European tour
starting in Germany. But here are the towns and stores in which he'll be

-Thursday, 6. June until Sunday, 9. June in Erlangen at the Comicsalon
-Monday, 10. June in Stuttgart at Karstadt Stuttgart, World of Comics,
Koenigsstrasse 1
-Tuesday, 11. June in Cologne (or in German Koeln), again at Karstadt,
World of Comics, Breite Strasse 103-135
-Wednesday, 12. June in Mannheim at PrinzMedienvertrieb, T1, 1-3
-and on Friday, 13. June in Freiburg at X fuer U GmbH,
Franziskanerstrasse 9

I got these dates of Ehapa Comic Collection (ECC), the German
distributor of Don Rosa's Comic books.

Bye,
Thomas

--
***********************************
Thomas Zimmermann
E-Mail: (Email removed)
http://www.uni-passau.de/~zimmerth/

DON:

Would you be willing to post the full lyrics to "Lydia, the
Tatooed Lady" for us here to enjoy? I know you have lots of free
time to kill, right?

My knowledge of the song goes back some twenty five years, when I
was in college. A good buddy of mine had a Groucho record, and
buried in amongst the rest of the album, was Groucho doing the
song. Really don't remember too much of it beyond the chorus, and
that it was kinda fun.

Bill Wormstedt - new guy on the block

I've bought today the new issue (#80) of "Zio Paperone" with chapter 11 of
Lo$, and I have some questions for
DON ROSA
wich I am sure he will kindly answer, as always. Maybe they can be of
interest to others, too.
(1) What in the world is "The Baggage Coach Ahead"? Is it a real song or was
it Barks' invention? (By the way, the Italian translation is: "Vagone
bagagli, avanti!" which recalls no existing old song; I've checked my copy
of "The city of Golden Roofs" in an earlier issue of the same "Zio
Paperone", and it says "Avanti con la diligenza!": this is just to say how
accurate and thoughtful is the translation by that nice lady in the staff -
I guess she's Lidia Cannatella- who doesn't even bother reading the previous
issues of the same journal... just like she translated $crooge's first dime
as a cent... well you know I didn't like it ;-))
(2) How could Disney allow guns being aimed at $crooge on page 3? Or didn't
they? (the Italian version of chapter 3 has all the guns in their original
place... at least I guess so). But if they redrew the panels with the guns,
how does $crooge get the hole in his fedora?
(3) Well, anyway I read Don's comments on the $crooge Page in WWW about
"inscrutable" orders from Disney. But I wonder what gets published in Italy.
In the same comment Don notes the mistake on page 9, second-to-last panel
(two pairs of spectacles) as being removed in later printings; well, in
Italy we got both spectacles all right. Then he laments the missing label
for nutmeg tea on page 18, panel 3... well, in "Zio Paperone" the bag reads
"nutmeg" so THAT was corrected instead. AND, the man who wants to buy
$crooge's Candy Stripe Ruby IS J. J. Abstor in our version (by the way, WHO
ever was J. J. Abstor?) but on page 2 I found no quote of W. R. Hearst (I
know who HE was... !).
So, after all, Don, excuse me. YOU have little to answer to my questions. Maybe
GIANFRANCO GORIA
knows Luca Boschi or someone else in the staff of "Zio Paperone" who can
answer my questions?
Thank you, everybody.

Marco

Jacob
Yes, the German B-Library-books are also printed in Slowenia (as are
more or less all Ehapa-comics)

Allessandra
Ciao e benvento! Siamo tutti molto felice che tu sei nella nostra
lista... So much for my rusty Italian.. Most of the "literary Ducks"
also have been printed in Germany, I think they are big fun! ("Gone
with the Wind" eg. Donald = R.Butler, Daisy = Scarlett...)

Wilmer/Frank
Of course HDL were much more cruel/mean at their beginnig - remember,
they were created by Al Taliaferro who loved slap-stick and cruel jokes
(in two early strips i know Donald actually kills Goofy - if his actions
were real-life)

Austrian "Micky Maus"
After an inquiry at Egmont Austria I now received some MM-books
with Austrian covers that came out for a period of about 6 months in
the latter half of 1988. The ones I have are from 7/21, 7/28 and
10/6.
I haven't got all the datesas yet - they promised me they would check
and tell me - but I can describe the actual differences:
1. The face of Mickey and the words "Micky Maus" are in a kind of
yellow strip. Below "Micky Maus" there is the line "Jeden
Donnersduck", which is a pun they used (and still use) in advertising:
as "MM" appears every thursday (Germ. "Donnerstag", pronounced
like "dawn (h)ers tuck") - and "Duck" sounds similar to "Tag".
2. Further the "gag"-cover is replace by a very rough, full page sized
xerox of a given panel of the book (like Bolivar sitting on top of a
Beagle-Boy licking him), surrounded by "headlines" like "Panic:
Beagle Boys Plan Super-Coup!" or somesuch. The whole idea is to
produce the look of a newspaper or tabloid of the flashy kind (of
course this is meant tongue-in-cheek).
3. At the bootom line there is the word "Egmont" instead of Ehapa.
4. All the cover pages feature Austrian ads, the first page (content)
also is Austrian-made, and at the center there are another 1-4 pages
with Austrian ads or letters. Sometimes there are pages like this
also at the end of the book.
All in all it's not a very stunning sight, but interesting to look at.
The ones I have, dont feature air-brushed covers, but some might, as
"Minnie", which was created by an Austrian publishing house, always
did.
Now, it would interest me, if there existed a Swiss edition at the
same time...

Harald

"Lydia, oh, Lydia, have you met Lydia? Lydia the tatooed lady?
When her muscles start relaxing, up the hill comes Andrew
Jackson..."
"...and her torso, even more so!"
"You can learn a lot from Lydia!"
(If someone wants more I'll type it down from my Groucho-CD)

---Harald Havas (Email removed)

Perhaps it could be of interest to all of you to know what EPS is.As the
name indicates we are part of the Egmont group, which has the Disney
license to publish magazines in around 25 different countries incl China.
We are producing around 4000 new Disney comic pages every year, all of
them with the code D. Half of the 4000 pages are 6 pannels and the rest
is 8 pannels. The 2000 8 pannel pages is around 90 % of what is produced
in that format. The majority of the 6 pannel stories are produced by our
Italian friends in Milano, with whom we have a very good cooperation. We
carry through our production from Copenhagen with the help of ca. 50
writers and 50 artists all on freelance basis., but nevertheless we can
always use new writers and artists, so if you are interested contact me
on the adress: (Email removed)
Best regards
Per Grubert (gen. manager)

I've been away for awhile, travelling and visiting people (including our
own Steve Rowe--Steve, thanks for letting the Digest people know where I
was!). So I can only skim the surface of recent Digests, but even so...

Nils Hjort wrote:

Yes, I admire these Our Gang comics 1943-1947 with Barks,
although I can't quite follow you when you say <<and for me, they stand out
as his best work of any in 1946>>. The DD stories are still [for me] the
best! And one shouldn't stretch the Scrooge parallels too much when
considering Uncle Grizzly of April 1947.

Coincidentally, this same month THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR noted that
Jack's own wealthy funny-animal character, EARL THE RICH RABBIT, also
predated Scrooge. But, even though this time we're dealing with a character
Barks co-created, the foibles of the idle rich (and their not-so-rich
relatives) had long been a staple of English and American humor, with many
practicioners ncluding Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh.
Barks himself admitted Scrooge owed much to Andy Gump's Uncle Bim (and, of
course, to his Dickensian namesake in A CHRISTMAS CAROL).

David Gerstein wrote:

<<Gawrsh, I'm no expert on this! I just recall that Michael
Barrier mentions some of the 1947 OG stories as being "art only" by Barks.
All of these have notably simpler plots than many Barks had done in the
past, but some have a flavor and a textual style that suggests that while
Barks didn't handle the plotting, he must have rewritten the guest writers'
scripts fairly heavily.>>

Which is what Martin O'Hearn, who IS a ranking expert in such things,
independently discovered when he read the Duck stories drawn but not written
by Barks. Maybe some of the later Barney stories might be able to give him a
handle on Gil Turner's style, but it most likely would be buried beneath
Barks' rewrite, just like Vic Lockman's original script for "Invisible
Intruder."

<<I believe that Daan Jippes redrew a Barks Happy Hound story
with his own bear character in the title role (a bear who looks a lot like
Barney, leading me to wonder why it wasn't a Barney story that got redrawn
this way). When Jippes and Heymans are through redrawing the Woodchuck
stories, might they like to redo Barks' Bear scripts with the Ducks -- at
least those that translate efficiently between characters? (The one where
Barney goes bee hunting and ends up attacked by cougars in the jungle seems
unlikely for Donald.)>>

Mightn't there be a legal question there? Even though all the strips
were published by Western, they all seem to be copyrighted in the names of
the individual characters' owners. (That's certainly true of Disney, which
owns Barks' output for it outright...or Gladstone couldn't publish the Barks
stories at all, not to mention Disney's use of Scrooge in DUCK TALES and
elsewhere, including theme parks.) If someone were to rewrite PORKY OF THE
MOUNTIES as a Duck story, Time Warner wouldn't like it at all, any more than
Disney would like it if DC turned "Only a Poor Old Man" into a Porky Pig/Bugs
Bunny story.
Presumably the Barney Bear stories belong to the current owner of
MGM--Ted Turner, I think, though he's in the process of selling out to Time
Warner (does that mean DC will end up with the Barney Bear/Benny Burro
stories?). So I wouldn't look to see Disney making use of the material any
time soon.

Frank Stajano wrote:

<<Why not? Can't you remember that wonderful Barks short story where some
silly old professor of pedagogy tells Donald that he should let their nephews
do whatever they feel like doing? Oh yes, the one where three infernal HDL
kept on changing thier minds about their preferred toys, driving Donald
crazy. And remember the end of that story? :-)>>

I think Wilmer's point was that, even at their worst, Huey, Dewey and
Louie wouldn't have seriously injured anyone, any more than Donald would
(especially someone who wasn't a villain). The fact that the professor was in
shape to chase the boys indicated that the firecracker was ultimately a
harmless one. (As has been noted, the Disney characters aren't as much like
the Spielberg "toons" as the Warner Bros. characters, especially in the comic
books. Wile E. Coyote can suffer through innumerable explosions and dropped
boulders with no further effects than singed fur that soon regenerates, but
Donald most definitely couldn't.)

Arthur de Wolf wrote:

<< What's the use of people thinking all those stories
were drawn by Walt Disney himself? Wouldn't it be much more fun if all those
people knew who made the stories? The Netherlands is a country with most
people not knowing about the writers and artists. Maybe it's a little
exaggerated, but
most of them think Walt Disney made all of those stories himself! If only
they'd print the credits, people would not be interested the first couple of
times they look at the credits, but after a while they're thinking: "Hey ...
I've seen that name before. That man is sure making GREAT stories!", and they
start recognizing styles. That way MUCH more people are getting interested in
the PEOPLE BEHIND the stories in stead of the ANIMALS IN the stories! >>

Which may possibly explain some of the reasoning behind the
decision...Disney owns Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, but it can't own Carl
Barks and Don Rosa. Still, I don't think very many people actually thought
Disney drew all the comics even in the '50's and early '60's, and now, with
Walt having been dead for three decades, it's less likely still.

Rich Morrissey