I totally agree, I'd love to have those Taliaferro Duck books!
Just finished the Silly Symphonies today. Great stuff. A bit rudimentary at first, but Taliaferro's art soon takes flight. 1934 seems to be when it all clicks together. The Boarding-School Mystery is a particular highlight of the book, a well-constructed little mystery with some good character work and an roaring finale. Can't wait for the next installment!
Last Edit: May 3, 2023 20:21:37 GMT by That Duckfan
I just got the new Fantagraphics copy yesterday and was looking at both together. By and large they are the same book with some formatting, color, and pre-story pictures changed. The story pages look identical to IDW’s version. The biggest difference I could find was the addition of the sequel story as described above. It’s a beautiful book though and anyone who was on the fence should be happy adding this one to their library.
I had an opportunity to look at the IDW copy, and the only other differences I could find were on page 8 (movie poster replaced by presskit) and 171 (empty page filled in by The Wise Little Hen movie poster and two model sheets. If anything changed in the supplementary texts, it didn't jump out at me.
The colors seem to 'pop' a little more in the IDW book, but that might just be my imagination. Maybe it's a different type of paper or something.
I just got the new Fantagraphics copy yesterday and was looking at both together. By and large they are the same book with some formatting, color, and pre-story pictures changed. The story pages look identical to IDW’s version. The biggest difference I could find was the addition of the sequel story as described above. It’s a beautiful book though and anyone who was on the fence should be happy adding this one to their library.
I had an opportunity to look at the IDW copy, and the only other differences I could find were on page 8 (movie poster replaced by presskit) and 171 (empty page filled in by The Wise Little Hen movie poster and two model sheets. If anything changed in the supplementary texts, it didn't jump out at me.
The colors seem to 'pop' a little more in the IDW book, but that might just be my imagination. Maybe it's a different type of paper or something.
I have all 4 of the IDW Silly Symphonies books, so I most likely won't be getting the new editions... but thanks, it's interesting to hear about the differences. The empty pages in the IDW tomes were always one of those things that told me their Disney books were the "Lite" version compared to the lavish bonus features of the Floyd Gottfredson Library.
Tom Andrae, Alberto Becattini, Sergio Lama, the late Luca Boschi and Cole Johnson and Malcolm Willits, Ken Shue (Disney Publishing VP of Global Art), the Disney Archives, the Disney Animation Research Library, various Disney affiliate publishers, the Gottfredson family, and so many others all worked exceptionally hard to help my team on the Gottfredson Library extras.
All of us felt it might be the only chance to get most of those features included. Barks' side works such as sketches, paintings, non-Disney art, and so forth were generally very well known, but Gottfredson books had in the past tended to reprint the same small handful of related art again and again.
We knew there was more. We dug and dug until we gathered almost everything we could. (A few more items have surfaced since the series was published...)
Silly Symphonies does have some superb, long articles by JB Kaufman and at least a good portion of rather rare artwork and related items. (I was thrilled to get the Wise Little Hen presskit page into our new edition.) But the Gottfredson Library, like the first-run 1980s Carl Barks Library, had to be absolutely special.
The second volume is out, and it's as good as the first one! Maybe even better. There's something for everybody.
If you like new adventures of Silly Symphonies characters, you get Three Little Pigs, the Three Kittens, and Elmer. One of Elmer's stories was based on an unfinished cartoon with some ideas by Barks. We get a glimpse of what might have been, and the book makes a great deal about it, rightfully so.
If you like Gottfredson's Mickey, there are a ton of Pluto and Donald strips with Mickey's supporting cast. They are a spin-off of the Mickey's strips, if you want. HDL debuted here, too, and there are some great Donald-HDL-Clarabelle dynamics.
And if you like Treasury of Classic Tales-style adaptions, there's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, written by Merrill De Maris and beautifully drawn by Hank Porter, with some incredible colors.
This is a great series, and a great companion to the Gottfredon's Library. I really hope Fanta will re-issue Volumes 3 and 4 too. Volume 3 might be problematic due to Hiawatha, though...
Ramapith The Finnish cover on Inducks has Donald in his TWLH style. Was he redrawn for this volume?
Ramapith The Finnish cover on Inducks has Donald in his TWLH style. Was he redrawn for this volume?
Less redrawn than replaced—and he sadly had to be, because the 1934 TWLH Donald didn't appear in this book.
We didn't exactly redraw him; we put together pieces of several later 1930s Taliaferro drawings to produce a 1937 Donald in a similar pose. (There is no one original that exactly matches, but it's all Taliaferro art.)
One thing that excited me about this volume is that since the mid-2010s, JB Kaufman and I had learned much more about the unproduced TIMID ELMER cartoon—on which Barks, Kelly, Horvath, and Bianca Majolie worked—so we were able to say much more about it now than we did then. It's the only place where we significantly altered existing text from the IDW edition.
[Update to clarify: there are other changes from IDW too, but to add entirely new material: additional pages of film publicity drawings, unpublished Taliaferro Elmer illustrations, and an extra Tillie Tiger story by Carl Buettner, from 1944 WDCS.]
I just received vol 2 as an early Christmas present and look forward to diving in! I'm so thankful to all the efforts at Fantagraphics to collect the various Disney material and bring it back into print with extra features.
Just finished the second volume. I especially enjoyed the early Donald Duck strips. They're cruder than I remember (in more than one sense of the word!), but just wonderful to see. The color is so complementary to Taliaferro's artwork. Only when you read these in order, do you see how the appearance of Morty and Ferdie prefigures the creation of Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Once it becomes clear that Donald has found his match, he becomes a much more interesting (and sympathetic!) character.
The Snow White adaptation is a classic and an absolute gem. I'm not too wise on 1930s comic strips, but the artwork for this one always puts me in mind of the Prince Valiant comics of that time. The Queen addresses the audience on multiple occasions, like some pantomime villain, but it works!
Other shout-outs to Mother Pluto, which is the sweetest thing, and The Practical Pig, which reads to me like the first 'modern' Wolf story. (As someone who still reads new Wolf stories weekly, that's saying something!)
Elmer Elephant is one I'm less fond of, especially the sequel. Elmer's way too good for that two-timing Tillie Tiger! I do think this cast would be a good addition to the new Dutch Toby Tortoise and Max Hare series.
Here's to hoping won't be the last entry in the series!
As mentioned earlier in the thread, huge parts of vol 3 has been banned by Disney, so Fanta isn't going to reprint that any time soon.
What?? They banned that too? Because of Little Hiawatha? Anyway, thank god we will soon reach technological singularity and copyright laws will cease to exist!
As mentioned earlier in the thread, huge parts of vol 3 has been banned by Disney, so Fanta isn't going to reprint that any time soon.
What?? They banned that too? Because of Little Hiawatha? Anyway, thank god we will soon reach technological singularity and copyright laws will cease to exist!
Yes, all Hiawatha stories have been banned. Which makes it a bit difficult to reprint a book where that's half the content.
I seem to remember someone saying that it helps if we don't freak out about this stuff. I hope Disney will come to reconsider their position on archival material. This is a niche series aimed at an adult collectors market, carefully curated by Disney historians. Surely that's a completely different context than just printing it in a popular ongoing monthly. But I'm only preaching to the choir here...
I don't think the ongoing monthlies/weeklies have been printing any Hiawatha for ages, when the ban went into effect it primarily affected the hardcover facsimile collections likewise aimed at adult collectors.