Keskustelujen arkisto

ARTHUR:

\> > As for HD&L's parents [...]
>Does that mean that you apart from the thing you said in the text
>with your Family tree in WDC&S#600:
> "Finally, last but not least by a jugful, we come to Heuey,
>Dewey and Louie's FATHER! But THAT is a revelation that I decided
>to deal with at a later date when you LEAST expect it!"

The line you quote was written for the "general public", not for you elite
of this Mailing List. The meaning is that I haven't the slightest idea when
or how or IF I'll ever deal with HD&L's father, so I'll get to it even when
*I* least expect it, since I don't expect it at all. Don't assume I have
something planned or you'll be disappointed when it never happens.

--------------------------------
End of Disney comics Digest V96 Issue #241
******************************************

Last week Egmont released the third hard cover pocket book in time for
christmas (!). The series replaced the very expensive and collectable
'big white books' and now retails at only 25% more than the regular soft
cover pockets, which are published monthly with 264 pages.

In spite of the title "Disney's Christmas Classics" the stories are all
published for the first time (outside Italy) and are fairly new in origin.
Except for a common christmas/new year theme there's nothing to really
distinguish it from the monthly pocket books. One or two older stories
would have given it a little flavor, but many interesting Italian stories
will probably not find their way into the current publications: I would
love to see Cavazzano's "Casablanca" and "La Strada" for instance, but the
100 year anniversary of movies apparently didn't inspire any publishers.
Maybe Gladstone would give it a shot?

Anyway, to give a little preview of the information to be found in an
Italian Topolino issue index, here are the titles and creators of the
stories included in "Disney's Juleklassikere 3". But the information
about the Danish Egmont stories you'll have to ask Harry about...

I 2091-A "Zio Paperone e le buone azioni" ["US and the good deeds"]
39 p., writ: Carlo Gentina, art: Romano Scarpa
D 93528 'A trophy for a jerk' [Egmont English title unknown]
53 p., writ: ?, art: ?
I 2092-A "Topolino e il cavaliere senza tempo" ["MM and the timeless knight"]
51 p., writ: Carlos Paura, art: Andrea Ferraris
I 1853-A "Zio Paperone e le piste gelate" ["US and the ice cream ski hill"]
34 p., writ: Maurizio Castellaro, art: Alessandro del Conte
D 88222 'Victory... in the long run' [Egmont English title unknown]
24 p., writ: ?, art: ?
I 2091-D "Soul Papers" [Donald and Fethry meet the Blues Brothers]
49 p., writ: Nino Russo, art: Fabio Celoni

More intrinsic italics to follow: feel free to fastforward, ye of little
interest in la lingua latina...

As Marco agreed with me, the index by Miroslav Benassi is full of typos
and inconsistencies. However it may not all be Miroslav's fault: when
adding a missing issue, I happened to have, a certain Sergio Palmas turned
up, but elsewhere in the index his name appears to be Angelo Palmas!
Other typos like Giampiero for Gianpiero or Gian Piero I just 'normalized'
to whichever spelling was most common(!) but others introduced whole new
first names and a guy was named Zammattaro twice, but two other things too!

A brief list of alternate names with references I'd like to have confirmed:

Marco Mozzarella (TL 2101) / Marco Mazzarello (TL 2101)?
Massimo Amendola (TL 1803) / Maurizio Amendola?
Luca Celoni (TL 1986) / Luciano Leoni (TL 2068) / Luciano Milano (TL 2077)?
Sergio Pezzin (TL 1817) / Giorgio Pezzin?
Beppe Ramello (TL 2016) / Giuseppe Ramello (TL 2064)?
Armando Orai (TL 1679) / Arnoldo Orai (TL 1694)?
Alessandro Ferraris (TL 1990) / Andrea Ferraris?
And is Giorgio di Vita third generation of the de Vitas?

I'd better stop here, but there are lots more: that's what happens when
you're editing a 2000+ issue index, and only got six issues yourself...
Whoever answers with some credible data is asking for trouble... :)

And those of you who find this a waste of bandwidth, please remember
that these Italian stories are published at a rate of hundreds of pages a
month across Europe. Unfortunately they are only credited in the original
Italian editions, so even popular artists like Cavazzano, Massimo de Vita,
and Scarpa are quite anonymous and unknown outside their home country.

Hopefully an index on these creators and their stories will at least give
us on the list some common ground to base our discussions on, and at least
the credit so justly deserved. I believe I can trust "the Miroslav Mess"
on most of that. :-)

This weekend brought me a lot further with the conversion, and files
for further editing may be close, Harry. Thank you too, Fabrizio, for
the interest, consider yourself on the subscriber list.

Whoever suggested that the total number of Disney stories are close
to a quarter of a million, take note that this will bring us some
5,000 closer to that mark in our database! Seriously though, I would
roughly estimate the number of beans in the jar to something like
25,000, give or take a few thousand. That order of magnitude anyway.

-- Ole <(Email removed)>

ARTHUR
>Attributing titles to Walt Disney involves choosing the correct
>nomenclature. The words "Walt Disney's", "Walt Disney's classics"
>and "Disney's Classics" apply to all features and characters created
>before Walt Disney's death in December, 1966. The last feature falling
>under this category is 'The Aristocats'. Any feature or character
>created after his death must bear the logo "Disney's" or "Walt Disney"
>without the apastrophe "s".

Well, the editors in England didn't seem to care - or maybe the _'s_
was appropriate, because Mickey was created before 1966? On the other
Hand: there is never an apostrophe on German Disney-titles, because
that would be wrong grammar! It allwasy "Walt Disneys Something"!

Harald
--- (Harald Havas) (Email removed)

On Nov 4, 10:01am, Ole R. Nielsen wrote:
> Subject: Christmas Classics
> Last week Egmont released the third hard cover pocket
> book in time for christmas (!). The series replaced the
> very expensive and collectable 'big white books' and now
> retails at only 25% more than the regular soft
> cover pockets, which are published monthly with 264 pages.
>
Oh darn. And I won't be going to Europe this year. I was in
Denmark the last two Novembers, and I picked up Volumes I and
II of "Julklassikere" then, but I won't be able to this year.
Darn. Drat. Phooey.

Unless--! Are there any friendly Danes willing to send me a
copy? I will pay for it plus shipping expenses, or can trade
American Disney stuff. After buying and reading the first
two, I'd hate to interrupt the series now...and it's about
the only way I see much Italian Disney product. Any help will
be appreciated!

--Dwight

DON:
> Keep in mind that what I do cannot be considered "art" until such
> time as I have unlimited space to do whatever I might want.

Every artist has its limits to work with. For instance the size of the canvas
for a painter like Rembrandt. Or the number of pages of a novel. Or the time
(and budget) of a movie.
That's not an argument NOT to call your work art.
"In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich der Meister" (ask Dwight for a translation of
this German quote. 8-)

Anyway, in the Database, a lot of entries list "art:Don Rosa".

--Harry.

DAVE R.:
It's rare, but I hafta disagree with you on two things here.

The point of that gag "woodchuck"... uh... poem? is not some sort of
question about "inate ability" or whatever... it's just a cute lil'
children's wordplay on the various ways to use the words "wood" and "chuck"
in a short sentence. So if you stick an errant "could" in there, you may be
making a valid comment about the abilities of a burrowing mammal, but you've
strayed from the gag. The only way there's a purpose behind it is with all
"wood/would"s. (But why are we talking about this? I can't recall.)

More to the topic... I fully agree that there are many ways to tell Duckburg
stories and many ways to interpret the personalities or backgrounds of our
heroes, and I would never suggest that the particular ways I pick are any
better than the next. But I do know that there are certain definite
guidelines between different "universes" of "funny-animal" comics. And in
the Duckburg universe, if you are to go by what has been established since
the 40s as the accepted, standardized, "official" view of what's proper and
improper in these stories, you cannot use weasel-people, vulture-people,
cat-people, or anything else but the normal tiny selection of types of
99.99% humanized animals, virtually all of which are either dogs or pigs. If
you wish to do Disney comics which are true main-stream funny-animal stuff,
great, but you'd need to deal with something like the "Chip n' Dale" or the
"Lil' Bad Wolf" stories in which ANY animal wears clothing and speaks.
Anytime this is violated, it's simply when the hired-editors aren't familiar
with the comics they are editting, that's why the Disney-Disney Comics had
weird stuff like talking super-villain penguins and talking
Kraven-the-Hunter jaquars and other creepy things. Brrr.

Byron's sad story of American News sounds about right,
based on what I've heard over the years from other places.
But it seems to me that comic books had other problems
right about then as well. There had been the horror
comics controversy that made comic books disreputable
in the public mind, and TV was making an impact in that
period. Other distributors rushed in to fill the gap;
I first started to pay attention to comic books in the
later '50s, and even then stores everywhere in my small
Ohio town sold the things. Grocery stores, drug stores,
even the dime stores. It's hard to imagine that distribution
could have been any more widespread a few years earlier.
After about 1959 or 1960, those outlets began drying up.
By the mid-'60s, only a newsstand and a couple of drug stores
still carried comics. Even then, it was obvious that kids
were by and large losing interest and comic books were
declining as a mass medium. Blame it on TV, but kids weren't
reading all that much any more. Even with the best distribution,
I don't think comics' long slow decline could have been stopped.
Kids were losing interest in the product. There may have been
missed opportunities to rejuvenate comics somehow, I don't
know. Stan Lee at Marvel made comics interesting to somewhat
older readers, the Batman TV show at least briefly attracted public
attention, but some more drastic change in the format or the
content was necessary at some point to replace the 32-page
pulp-paper dinosaur, and it didn't happen. The collapse of
American News certainly didn't help matters, and newsstand
distribution has been a nightmare ever since, but even the
best, most efficient distribution won't sell a product hardly
anybody wants.

Which brings me to an idea I may have proposed here before.
It's been said that the Disney Stores don't want to handle
comic books because of the hassle of stocking the racks with
frequently replaced periodicals. So I wonder...would there
be a market for Gladstone to repackage its comics as non-returnable,
non-periodical books? They'd still be comic books, more or less,
but maybe prestige format with stiff covers and quality paper.
They wouldn't be dated, and they'd reprint stories and Things
to Do type pages from Disney comics of yore. Anything over two
or so years old that kids wouldn't have seen would be fair game.
The target markets would be places like airport newsstands, bus
stations, gas stations, souvenir shops at tourist attractions,
and hospital gift shops. Basically places where parents would
find themselves stuck with cranky kids in need of amusement,
but Disney Stores and regular bookstores, too. No continued
stories, of course; these wouldn't be periodicals. Just books
parents would buy for their kids. Gladstone could produce four
or five new ones a year to keep variety in the shops' offerings,
but they wouldn't be numbered. They'd be something parents would
buy for their kids, so the price wouldn't have to be in allowance
range. Since they'd be all reprints, production costs would be low.
And Disney's name would sell to the buyers even if the actual
readers might not spend their own money on the books.

I've heard that Disney Comics packaged special issues of its
comics for the discount store market. Three or so comic books
in a non-returnable bag sold in lots of thousands of units
made a bit of money and avoided the newsstand distribution mess.
Could Gladstone do the same? (Or does it already?) I know this
sort of thing has often been done, by Western under a couple of
different imprints to name just one example.

--Dwight Decker