Keskustelujen arkisto

The impulsion of Gladstone has now been debated for
a few days now. It seems that collectors get what they
want and kids (in company with parents) do not get
what thet want or rather it does not make much difference,
since they prefere other magazines anyway.

I am not sure what makes a Disney Comics fan. When I was
?-10 years old I read Superman, Batman and some scarry
mag of which I do not remember the name. So what does
it take to become a DC fan in an early age?

When I was at that age, and my parents visited my uncle
and aunt, I use to spend the whole evening reading my
cousin Camillas (younger than me) weekly mags. Some of the
stories had a 'selected story' mark, and made me curious.
I made lists and found out that some was easy to categorise
like Barks (never heard of him at that time) and others were
little more difficult like de Vita and Cavazzano. However, I
was never really interested in those short stories in the Danish
weekly, instead I collected the Jumbobog ("best" from Italian
Topolino) that contain stories of some 30 pages. They
are relative expensive and big books (256 pages), but I
had more of them at that time than weekly mags. What I am
saying is, that it is not *necessarily* that children only buy
cheep weekly mags - on the contrary, those mags are often
bought by business men in hurry, travelling trains, keeping
their mind away from that important deal or meeting or whatever.
Children at 8 or 10 luckily don't have to worry about that.

Might it just be, that the Gladstone magazines are too
"difficult" or for children??? I know that difficult is not
the right word, but then...hm...intellectual in the sense that
in a Rosa story for example, the characters involved are typically
lined up in a natural human posture debatting the problem in
question, nicely and calmly - they are like "static" - nomatter how
full of action the story might be. I am not sure that appeals to
children compared to what we see from some Italian "dynamic"
artists where the characters are almost in motion within
the panels.

=Soeren

Just in case not everyone has heard the news: Walt Disney's
widow, Lillian, died yesterday at the age of 98. It was of
course Mrs. Disney who suggested that her husband should
re-name his new cartoon character, Mortimer Mouse, "Mickey"
instead.

On a **very** different subject, Marco asks:
> who, or what, in the world is <Spawn>?
He's the hero (or villain - it's so hard to tell the difference
nowadays) in a rather violence-oriented comic book which enjoys
quite heavy sales, perhaps due to its dizzying art work and its
not using very many long words. A lot of kids really look up
to Spawn as their ideal adult. He's cool. He's sexy. He's dead.

Wilmer Rivers

Greetings, earthlings...

GARY:

> There have been attempts to 'update' the characters
in other mediums such as 'Quack Pack' with limited success. No, let's keep
some dignity and rest assured this is a temporary setback. Quality will always
survive and be more appreciated as less of it appears on the comic shelves.

I agree. The *quality* of Disney comics is not challenged, but their
*marketability* surely is! That's why U.S. Disney comics are in such
deep trouble, although IMHO the reasons for that situation are yet to
be further discussed... When Disney comics can sell in Brazil but
can't in the U.S., nobody in this country thinks The Disney Company is
making a domestic blunder -- maybe Disney feels more comfortable as a
Medieval kingdom whose main concerns are collecting taxes (copyright
royalties) and doing warfare & defense duties (fighting competition
and conquering new market territories). In this way, struggling for
market share in the U.S. is secondary today and so it should be
tomorrow. Please note that in no way I think "Disney Company is
always right", but I suppose their marketing strategy is more clearly
viewed as a whole from some distance.

P.C.Barreto
(Email removed)

PAULO C. L. BARRETO:

Could you tell us if original Disney comics are still published in
Brazil? How many pages? In what publications? Pato Donald? The most
recent Brazilian story I saw has a "B 93n" code. Are there still "Disney
heroes" stories, or "modern" Daisy stories created in Brazil?

BTW, was there a "Peninha" (Fethry Duck) magazine in Brazil?

DANIEL VAN EIJMEREN:

>However, what I wondered about is that there hasn't been a
>'straight-from- the-original-comic' reprint of **"Donald Duck Tells
>About Kites"** (of which apparently the photostats are lost). I find
>it interesting to read about old Snowwhite and Pinocchio booklets,
>but how can Gladstone let this chance pass to give readers a chance
>to read "Tells About Kites" as it originally was drawn by Barks? (In
>the CBL it is heavily retouched.)

"Retouched" in the first Black and White edition, or in the second in
color? (or maybe in both of them?). And, btw: why?

KRISTIAN:

The professor in "Life of Scrooge" is not the same that brought back the
square eggs in "Lost in the Andes". He did get the square eggs, but
don't know exactly who discovered the eggs, and where. So: no error on
Don's side! (of course :-).

Francois

Vidar Svendsen:
> I've compared the new edition to my 1965-edition. (It took some time - my wife
> forgot to buy Donald Duck on Tuesday)
>
> There are no art changes I as far as I can see. But we've got a new
> translation,
> and improved colouring and lettering. (like no more blue snow or
> brown rabbits in the winter).

Well, I don't have an older version to compare with, but when
I read the story and went from page 4 to page 5 of the story
I felt that the art changed, as if someone has redrawn it or
something. The first 4 pages seemed to be sharper or cleaner
than the rest of the story IMHO, is it like that in the older
version as well?

About chapter VIII of Lo$:
In this chapter Scrooge meets Wyatt Earp, who
shoots him self in the foot. As I was reading this
I rembered Kevin Costners movie about Wyatt Earp and
how it made a big deal out of the fact that Wyatt
was never ever in his life hit by a bullet. So my
question is, is Don Rosas story historically incorrect
here, or was this "fact" just a part of the fictionpart of this
movie? I guess it really is more of a history question than
a Disney question, but the people on this list seems to be
knowledgable about a lot of things, so I thougth I'd ask it
anyway.

Disney Comics in Denmark and Norway:
Egmont seems to print the same stories at the same time
in Denmark and Norway. I mean "Anders And & Co" and "Donald Duck & Co"
is eqvivalent, and same seems to go for "Jumbobogen" vs "Donald Pocket"
How far back has this been going on? Or if I have an Index for
Denmark how far back will it also apply for Norway?

Claus O. M. Havik

To Kristian Thougaard Pedersen regarding the Square eggs in LO$...

I refer you to http://www.win.net/~homebrew/los287_1.htm where Don Rosa
himself explains what happened. I quote directly,

"The Norwegian DONALD DUCK editor asked me to make some gag reference to
Barks' famous "square egg" story; that tale is incredibly famous to
Europeans, something like Americans regard the story of... uh... well,
actually, Barks' Ducks are so popular in Europe that there's nothing in
American pop-culture that's comparable. But this reference is where I
really goofed! In the original version of this story as printed
throughout Europe, the old gent that $crooge meets on the train was
supposed to be Rhutt Betler, the "Professah from Bummin'ham", himself.
That version went through numerous editors and translators and was
published throughout Europe before one Swedish reader wrote me to point
out that the Old Vicuna Hunter in "Lost in the Andes" told of Prof.
Betler "passing into the long sleep". Oops! I realized that I remembered
that bit, but ever since I first read that story as a kid, for some
insane reason I'd always thought the hunter had been
referring to a second visitor to Plain Awful, after Prof. Betler...
though I can't see why I ever assumed that. So, I reworded the Gladstone
version to make the old gent on the train into whoever it was who bought
the square eggs from the "padre in Cuzco" to whom the Hunter tells of
selling the dead man's square eggs. But... what's the point of having
$crooge meet him? Furthermore, it was later pointed out to me that
whether this was the professuh or not, nobody knew about the square
chickens -- the eggs were simply found on the ground in Plain Awful.
Anyone might assume there must be square chickens laying square eggs in
the square land... but the valley-people still weren't "raising" them.
Well, I just plain-awful screwed up ... for neither the first or last
time."

So there you have it! Just one of those things.

P.S....Don Rosa...I just re-re-re-re-read the story of the ducks' Return
to Plain Awful. I'd forgotten how much I LOVE that story! Besides the
fact that ol' Flinty is my third favorite character (Goldie and Scrooge
being the first two, of course,) that "made it square" gag at the end
had me howling. I'd forgotten it, so I had the treat of "discovering"
it all over again. Great work. Have you done anything with Flintheart
besides this one and "Son of the Sun"?

Katie Sullivan
http://www.execpc.com/~sulliva1/
(Email removed)

DANIEL VAN EIJMEREN commented, regarding the Gladstone policy of
putting only a dollop of Don Rosa material in each issue of WDC&S:
<<IMO it is more or less admitting that artistically the magazine has come
to a standstill. No matter how good Carl Barks and Don Rosa are, there must
certainly be more other maybe-yet-undiscovered good writers and artists
capable of making great stories. If a magazine is not open to give that a
chance, but depends on already existing established-as-succesful writers,
I think it will sooner or later rust away. (And a lot of people are already
bored to death by the Barks re-re-reprints, so that leaves only Rosa for
now.)>>

If the post-Meltdown WDC&S takes over the "en masse" Taliaferro
strip reprints from DONALD DUCK, then you'll KNOW that that magazine
has artistically packed it in. A few pages per issue would be OK,
but a double-digit amount...

<<BTW. Isn't it possible for Gladstone to get the support of Disney
television in advertising their products? The latter years we have heard
quite a lot of Disney restrictions, but hopefully there exists something
like Disney *support* somewhere?>>

A lot of us Disney TV Animation fans were asking exactly the same
thing back in the Disney Comics days, when DUCKTALES, RESCUE
RANGERS, and TALE SPIN were in their heyday of popularity. Disney's
failure to advertise the comics on its TV series was the single
worst mistake committed by the extremely fallible Disney marketing
department. Sadly, if Disney didn't think it worthwhile to plump
for TV animation comics PUBLISHED BY DISNEY on the TV shows
themselves, then I doubt very seriously that it's willing to give
Gladstone any publicity!

GARY LEACH asked the question:
<<So what, today, would a "real" Disney comics line be? What should it be?
What can it be? And what will be the market for whatever it is? These
questions have to be resolved if any future "big attempt," by anyone, is to
have a prayer of succeeding.>>

Yes, indeed... Perhaps THE biggest question that this hypothetical
line has to answer is how the "classic" characters would be used
relative to the "new realities" of modern characters and modern
tastes. I get a sense that most people on the list would prefer
not to see the wholesale "Quack-Pack-ization" of the Ducks and the
Mice. But some have expressed the opinion that Gladstone's reliance
on "re-re-re-reprints" and historical material such as "The Year
That Was" has given it the patina of old fogey-dom -- with the
reader being invited to draw the conclusion that some sort of
"modernization" is necessary if Disney comics fans are to avoid
becoming the equivalent of Barks' Sir Julius Seizer and Lord
Burybone.

This is why I believe that an "Egmont-esque" establishment of
several levels of Disney comics is necessary -- "classic" comics
for the history-minded, "hipper" comics akin to the Dutch weekly,
and comics based on TV and feature characters. You can argue that
such a system has existed in the U.S. by default, with several
different sources being used to dispense different sorts of
comics. That's the point -- there should be a SINGLE entity
dispensing all levels of comics. Disney Comics came the closest
to this goal; Gladstone, aside from the DUCKTALES title it ran in
the late 80's, has not aspired to it. The publisher that can
make the commitment to this approach AND get the requisite marketing
effort needed to give it a fighting chance will represent "the next big
attempt" to bring a "real" Disney comics line back to America.

-- Christopher E. Barat
(Email removed)
http://members.aol.com/cebarat/home.htm