Keskustelujen arkisto

We HAD to spread the story out; it's one of Gottfredson's longest!
As for censorship??we were required to do a very small bit:

?¢ At one point black Africans are seen; we softened their dialect slightly while not eliminating it, and reinked them slightly to make them dogfaces instead of monkeyfaces (two strips affected).
?¢ When Mickey gets off the boat, he disguises himself by putting on what was originally blackface makeup; in our edition, it's shaded a bit differently to look more like facial stubble (one line of dialogue altered; very slight art tweaks not affecting any expressions or poses; three strips affected, including the two cited above).
?¢ Yussuf Aiper the bandit leader, and other bandits, were inconsistently called both "chief" and "sheik"; in modern American English, "sheik" is a term used to imply a political leader, so in view of the present Middle Eastern situation, we changed "sheik" to "chief" in several places (single word in about eight strips affected).
?¢ A reference to Yussuf hating "foreigners" was changed to "enemies", and "massacre" deleted from his list of crimes he looked forward to committing, again in view of the present Middle Eastern situation (single word in two panels affected).

We felt these small changes were a small price to pay to "unban" this story. In all other ways, the WDC&S edition is more faithful to the original than Abbeville's version, where text was condensed and relettered all over the place. (It's also more faithful than the Dell edition of 1941, which also did some relettering and cut the entire opening off the story??pages' and pages' worth of action!)

Is it necessary at all, you ask, Hedberg?
If the decision were entirely up to me (an important factor here), and we were publishing the story in a hardbound book aimed solely at adult collectors, I personally wouldn't want to censor it. Such a book would be aimed at readers who expected dated material.
That said, WDC&S isn't such a product; it is sold to customers of all ages, and we have to keep that in mind. I don't mind "light" censorship in that particular venue if the basic story, the brilliant characterizations, and 99.5% of the dialogue are preserved intact. I had the opportunity to grow up with Floyd Gottfredson; slightly censored Gottfredson, but far better than none at all. I don't think it's selfish to wish the same for other young North American readers.

After checking out the story on Beru's site and comparing it to the Abbeville book, it also appears that a panel was excised from this version--the one in which a tipsy Pete and Trigger are toasting Mickey's imminent death ("Ashes to ashes/Dust to dust/If thuh natives don't get him/Then thuh desert must!") It's easy to see why this panel got censored; it makes me wonder if it would now be impossible to reprint "Sky Island" unexpurgated, due to the extended scene that features an inebriated Pete singing sea chanties. Ah, brave new world. I don't blame the folks at Gemstone an iota, and I commend them for doing their best to get Gottfredson's work out there; it just depresses me that the Disney establishment is still sticking its ugly nose into comic-book production; I had hoped that the appearance of Foreign Legion in comic-book form meant that they might have "lightened up."

Quote from user: Gyro GearlooseAfter checking out the story on Beru's site and comparing it to the Abbeville book, it also appears that a panel was excised from [Gemstone's] version--the one in which a tipsy Pete and Trigger are toasting Mickey's imminent death
Er??huh? That panel is still in Gemstone's edition; see page 34, to be precise (or 36, if you count the two recap pages at the start of our Chapters 2 and 3).
In looking for the page number I did notice a couple of more one-word edits in a couple of strips, where "natives" and "tribe" (in reference to a gang of bandits) became "bandits" and "clan," for the reasons outlined earlier. In Pete's and Trigger's drinking song, "bandits" was originally "natives" (so in this case, Abbeville is accurate).
Want to hear that drinking song? It's a parody of a real song from World War I, and you'll find it here?? http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/Arthur%20Fields%20-%20Good%20Morning%20Mr%20Zip-Zip-Zip.mp3
(Listen for the second stanza of the chorus for the equivalent line.)