Keskustelujen arkisto

[ Ole Reichstein Nielsen ]

> Don had just flown in from Oslo, Norway, where he claimed to have been
> treated like a rock'n'roll star - the more the sleepier Denmark must
> have appeared to him: during his visit in the famous Fantask comic shop
> only a couple of dozen fans had found their way in, but there hadn't
> really been much time to advertise and the local 'city slicker'
> newspaper didn't mention the celebrity visit.

Well, *somebody* who lives less than an hour from me, and who knew the details
all along didn't bother to pick up the phone and call me to ask if I wanted to
tag along. ;)

Besides, after their show last summer I spoke to, shook hands with, and got
signatures from the Tokyo Shock Boys - so it takes a bit more than a guy from
Kentucky to impress me. *grin*

-- Jan Lund Thomsen

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan Lund Thomsen (aka Qed/Triangle 3532) Lystrup, Denmark
C64/RPG/INWO/Warner Bros/Disney/Anthro/Comics-addict and all-around nice guy.
----------- Email: (Email removed) ---------- Fido: 2:238/128.11 ----------

Hi!

DAVE RAWSON:
I'm sorry that I slated your story like that. I did think that the
storyline was a little far-fetched and had some weird twists, but I still
admire everyone who writes and/or draws Disney comics. I've tried to write
my own script for a Disney story several times, but I never succeeded. I
always ended up with unfinished scripts that I wasn't able to complete.
Regarding that, I think it was thoughtless of me to judge your story like
that. I guess the exagerated implausibility that you're talking about is
characteristic for Disney comic stories. I liked other stories that you have
written, but this one seemed to be just a little weird at first.

DWIGHT DECKER:
> Leave it to a Disney ML expert to know it anyway!
It was not my intention to mention the year you bought that comic, to show how
old you are! In the letter, in which you started about the Picsou-coin, you
never said that you bought the comic NEW off a newsstand in Paris, so everyone
could have thought that you bought the comic secondhand. You said that you bought
the comic new, AFTER I had said in what year that was. You never needed to do
that! So please don't blame ME!
And about the experts, I know that I'm not an expert like your are,
and I will never be! There are people on this list whom write, draw, letter
or do whatever with Disney comics for their WORK, and I never will. I'm sorry
about that. I'm just trying to contribute a little to the list once in a while,
but I didn't know that the experts, like you, didn't like that. Sorry that I'm
not an expert. My letters are not as interesting as yours or David's or Don's
are! But I do my best! I only have 5000+ Disney comics from 50+ different
countries around the world and if that's not enough to be allowed to write to
this list, then that's your problem. I think everyone should be able to write to
the list, being expert or NOT!
I just wanted to give everyone some background information on those
Picsou-coins, for God's sake!

BYE!

Arthur de Wolf -- Roosendaal, the Netherlands
email: (Email removed)
homepage: www.pi.net/~wolfman/disney

Another "On the Ball" gripe: how do you even PRONOUNCE the villain's name?
(It's spelled Phwue.)

On Jul 30, 11:04am, Arthur de Wolf wrote:
> Subject: A letter from a NON-expert

> > Leave it to a Disney ML expert to know it anyway!

> Sorry that I'm
> not an expert. My letters are not as interesting as yours or David's
or Don's
> are! But I do my best! I only have 5000+ Disney comics from 50+
different
> countries around the world and if that's not enough to be allowed to
write to
> this list, then that's your problem. I think everyone should be able
to write to
> the list, being expert or NOT!
> I just wanted to give everyone some background information on
those
> Picsou-coins, for God's sake!
>
Arthur, Arthur, Arthur! You misunderstood me! Perhaps it's
the language barrier, in which the words might come across
but not necessarily the music (i.e., the nuances), or maybe
it's just my rhetorical style being easy to misinterpret,
but I was being _amused_, not _sarcastic_. So let's get a
few things straight to prevent further misinterpretation--

1. I like you, Arthur!
2. I have great respect for all the work you do on the ML
in researching publishers and other bibliographic data.
3. I read your ML postings with interest and enjoyment.
4. You _are_ an expert and I'm a little envious of you
for your energy and enthusiasm for tracking information
down.
5. My age isn't that big a deal. I was making a small
(very small, evidently) joke there.

So what I can I say? Keep up the good work? The overall
state of Disney Knowledge would be the poorer and less
complete without you? Something like that. I apologize
if I led you to think you're not appreciated around here.

Friends?

--Dwight Decker

Hi!

DWIGHT DECKER:
It was a joke? I really thought it was for real! I had a hard time
after you wrote that letter. I thought you were blaming me for letting
everyone know your age AND you told me to leave it to the experts on
the list! Maybe you better try using 'smileys', next time you make a joke,
like this one ;-)
Ofcourse we're friends again! :-D

Bye!

Arthur de Wolf -- Roosendaal, the Netherlands
email: (Email removed)
homepage: www.pi.net/~wolfman/disney

RICH:
You may be pleased that Wizard is investigating, but so far the
allegations by Pat O'Neill, their news coordinator, are:

European fans of Carl Barks do not know who he is and therefore could not
have cast an informed vote.

European fans of ducks are completely unaware of the comics market in the
United States and therefore could not have cast an informed vote.

It was improper for European fans to vote for Barks since they've only
seen translations of the original story and couldn't properly judge its
worth thereby.

Every employee of Disney character comics (including office staff) and
all their marriage partners were forced to vote for Barks. Further, few
of these folks even know who Barks is, nor are they fans.

At one point O'Neill laid the accusation that the votes were from
identically xeroxed ballots which were merely signed off by coerced
underlings.

There have been endless permutations of these and other accusations by
O'Neill. His proof of these accusations is that he has trusted unnamed
sources and they say it is all so.

But please, don't take my word for it. I'm a very biased participant who
felt that O'Neill showed incredible ignorance, an unprincipled behavior
coupled with a complete lack of remorse for even his most eggregious
accusations, and ultimately, continuing and reckless regard for the
truth.

It's my fervent hope that someone with a big stick will someday speak to
him about this, particularly his charge that it was a collusion of mostly
European businessmen who banded together to perform this alleged vote
fraud.

Examine the public record for yourself. It exists in the DEJANEWS
database completely available to anyone with access to the internet.

If you have a browser, point it to:

http://www.dejanews.com/forms/dnq.html

and set the search criteria to "CBG & Awards" which is the name of the
thread. You may want to play with the Search Options a bit to try and
restore a sequential intelligibility to the almost 500 messages regarding
this topic. If you like, you can set a query filter to isolate out all
messages except O'Neill's, or all except mine, or others, if you want to
follow a particular person's take on the controversy. I admit, I'm not
very nice when confronted with irresponsible rumuor and deliberate
innuendo. I know of folks whose lives were ruined by just such behavior.

JAN:
I agree with you about how hysterically funny is Don's ON A
SILVER PLATTER and I've only seen the Danish version which I can't read!

ARTHUR:
Don't be sorry about sharing your thoughts on a story. I'm quite
serious that any feedback is honored and useful. The more specific, the
better. I've received enough contradictory comments that I can usually
sort out what's unique to a given person's likes and dislikes, and what's
actually a problem. We're all individuals and not every story will be
liked by everyone. I'm extraordinarily lucky to get paid to do what I
like and to try and get better and better at it. Dave Sim, the creater of
CEREBUS, has a saying that every creator has 1000 bad pages in them they
must get out before they can begin to create good pages. I hope to reach
that mark before too long...

Regarding your own attempts at creating stories, I encourage you to
persist. That's what it takes if you have talent, which by itself is not
enough, unfortunately.

MARKOFF (sorry, I couldn't find your proper name, nor remember it today,
forgive me):

Phwue is pronounced like phooey, except as a blended single sylabble.
Just like strongman Shwue of Mayanmar is pronounced. Any resemblance to
the Burmeese bully who is keeping under prolonged house arrest the Nobel
Peace Prize winning woman, the legitimate ruler Su Ang Ki(sp?) who won by
a landslide the freely democratic election there, is purely an
implausible coincidence, even if this particular story was distributed
all over southeast Asia years ago, demonstrating to the citizens of
Myanmar (quite by implausible coincidence) that folks in the West were
aware of the absolute and total blackout of news into and out of Myanmar
under one of the most brutal and represive regimes still existing on
earth. Capice?

HARRY:
As I understand it, the Egmont affiliate in Hong Kong
commissioned a story to appear as an insert with a kind of Rubic's sphere
that was being marketed in southeast Asia. This sphere, which was a
licensed Disney product, had on its surface the likeness of Mickey and of
Donald. They were wearing odd and garish costumes. Pat and I were asked
to quickly come up with a 16 page story that utilized the sphere and
which explained the clothing the characters were wearing.
Wise folks within Egmont realized this also was a wonderful
opportunity to share a Mickey-and-Donald-together story with the rest of
the world, so Pat and I had the additional requirement of structuring the
story so that Egmont could split the story in two, as well -- make it a
continued cliffhanger for everywhere outside of Asia.
Since we knew this would be distributed in southeast Asia
(another unique opportunity), I added the requirement that this story
become an implausibly coincidental, thinly-guised parable of what was
happening in Myanmar (almost totally unrealized by much of the outside
world. I was moderator of the FidoNet InterUser Echo which was one of the
first groups of computers to link and span the Northern Hemisphere and we
were getting occasional reports of the closing of Myanmar, as well as
communicating with folks in Tallin, Estonia across the bay of Finland who
were in turn passing on communiques from St. Petersberg, the Ukraine and
as deep behind the then Soviet Wall as Irkutsk. This was some time before
the fall of the Wall.)
Two problems with ON THE BALL eventually developed. One, the art
was servicable, but not as inspired as was hoped for such an auspicious
reunion. Second, there is an arcane Disney rule, I was told, which says
that no Disney character may be used to endorse any product. Therefore,
it was reasoned, since Mickey and Donald used the sphere in the comic,
this was tacit endorsement of the product and verbotten, despite the fact
that it was an approved Disney product which bore their likeness to begin
with and that was the purpose for which the comic was commissioned. I
don't pretend to understand the logic of it. All I know is it was yanked
at the last minute. Many, many folks were disappointed world-wide. I was
devestated. (I didn't realize until years later that it HAD at least been
printed and distributed in Asia.)
Then, also years later, a brilliant, elegant, simple, genius idea
occured. It was realized that the sphere could be redrawn as a medallion.
It wouldn't, then, be a real-world product, nor thereby a tacit
endorsement, and Ferioli was available to do the art! Bingo.
Apparently, when Gladstone heard that Egmont had scheduled ON THE
BALL for publication, they assumed it was the version they had seen (that
I had sent them as a casual xerox copy and curiosity that would never see
the light of day). Further, Branca was mis-atributed as the artist, and
though all their pre-publication publicity listed Pat McGreal as
co-writer, somehow that was left off the actual credits.
So there you have a capsule of what I currently understand and
which could be flawed in the telling or the particulars, but the sense of
it remains, I believe.

Your humble scribe,

DAVE RAWSON:
>Regarding the implied history of past adventures shared by Mickey and
>Donald, no, this was no reference to cartoons. Rather, it was to
>establish that these characters knew each other and had shared a rich
>history together. A minor conceit I find pleasent and fertile to
>contemplate, much like the hints of something greater that Barks would
>use and which Don has made his forte in the wonderful Scrooge series.
>This implied past history between the two characters was also a point of
>praise from Joe and from Dana Gabbard. So readers are of a strongly mixed
>mind on this.

So those were just made up at the moment, not anything "real" from a
previous story?

The message wasn't explained well enough, I guess. It's sort of
disconcerting to most of us, since Donald and Mickey have always lived in
two different "worlds," to see them suddenly acting as "old friends."

--Jonathan Markoff

>Another "On the Ball" gripe: how do you even PRONOUNCE the villain's name?
>(It's spelled Phwue.)
>

How about pronouncing it "Fooey"? - Kathy, the "Fooey" fan.