A question to Dutch readers

[drakeborough]

I was reading some old comments on the DCML (Disney Comics Mailing List) when I stumbled on this message from 1993 saying

I also remember a dutch Donald Duck where there is a picture in the beginning (not as part of a comic) where Donald is talking in the phone asking Della when she is going to reclaim her sons. Unfortunately (for Donald) Huey (or whoever) has unconnected the phone.

Can any Dutch reader here identify the issue?

[RobbK1]

Dec 12, 2016 22:29:39 GMT drakeborough said:

I was reading some old comments on the DCML (Disney Comics Mailing List) when I stumbled on this message from 1993 saying

I also remember a dutch Donald Duck where there is a picture in the beginning (not as part of a comic) where Donald is talking in the phone asking Della when she is going to reclaim her sons. Unfortunately (for Donald) Huey (or whoever) has unconnected the phone.

Can any Dutch reader here identify the issue?

It rings a faint bell with me.  I don't remember seeing that back in the old days ('50, '60s or '70s).  I can't place it in the '80s or '90s.  So, I'm guessing it might have come from The 2000s or fairly recent issues.  I still bought most of the issues up to 2004, and about half the issues through 2007.  But, since about 2000 or so, I haven't paid much attention to them, other than issues with stories by my friends and myself.  Maybe Duckfan can help us with this?

[drakeborough]

It can't be from the 2000's or later, because the comic is mentioned in the DCML message I linked above, which was written on 24 March 1993.

[RobbK1]

Dec 13, 2016 8:31:08 GMT drakeborough said:

It can't be from the 2000's or later, because the comic is mentioned in the DCML message I linked above, which was written on 24 March 1993.

Well, then I probably have the particular book.  I knew almost everyone on DCML in 1993 (certainly all the Dutch members), so, still having contact with all of them, (or, at least with someone who has contact with the few I don't)- I could track it down.  Unfortunately, I believe that Frederick Ekman was a Swede, and I never knew him.  I have Swedish friends who probably could contact him.  But it appears from his statement, that he has no idea which book he saw, and does not have possession of it at that time.  It rings a bell with me, but, I don't have time to look through even every one of my hundreds of 1970-1993 books, let alone adding the '50s and '60s books to those (many of which I don't have, and would need to look at at friend's houses (but I'm not in The Netherlands now).  In any case I don't have time for all that research.  I've asked 2 friends if they remember that drawing.  They have yet to reply to my e-mails.

[RobbK1]

I have brought this up to a long-time friend of mine, who has been the Inducks COA Indexer of Dutch comic books for the last 30+ years. He also has ALL The Dutch Weekly comic magazines, back to when they started weekly, and all the monthly Donald Ducks before that. He remembers ONLY the reprint of the Al Taliaferro 1938 daily newspaper comic strip in which Donald was talking to his sister, on the telephone, and The 3 Nephews came riding into his living room.  In any case, there was never a new portrayal of Donald telephoning his sister. That seems to be what I recollect, as well, as I did read ALL the Dutch Weeklies from when they started in the early 1950s through mid 2007. And, I don't remember any strip, or panel excerpt, or one panel gag, in which Donald is talking to his sister, other than the original Taliaferro scene.  I never saw any scene in Donald Duck Weekblad in which one of the Nephews pulls the phone wires out of the wall, or sabotages Donald from continuing to talk to Della.  I have no idea where that Swede got that idea.  I looked through all Taliaferro's Donald strips, and found nothing like that.  I have seen all of them printed in the Dutch and US and Scandinavian books, and never seen such a panel.  And I had read ALL the Dutch comics from1952-2007, and I read all the editorial(letter pages) (first 2 inside pages, that sometimes used old Donald comic art with new gags, written by editorial staff.  And I don't remember ever seeing what Ekman described.  I would have remembered seeing that, as Donald's close relatives, and the fact that The Nephews' parents were never referred to, or used as characters in the stories was a pet peeve to me.  I think Ekman was remembering incorrectly.  He admitted that he "thinks" he remembers that.

[RobbK1]

I am waiting for Hidde and Duck Fan to comment on this. I'll bring it up on McDrake.nl, but I'm afraid that forum is almost dead now.

[drakeborough]

Thanks for you research, Robb.

So, it looks like Ekman may have been remembering things incorrectly, and maybe was thinking of Donald and Della talking to each other in the phone in a Taliaferro strip.

There's also the chance Ekman is right and both Robb and the Dutch indexer have forgotten the drawing (decades of comics are hard to remember), but if this is the case we may never know it: we can prove a positive (the existence of something) but not a negative (the insestistence of something), unless one could view every single page of every Dutch comic printed until 1993. I guess Hidde, Duck Fan and the people at McDrake.nl could give us a more definite answer. It would also be good to have a comment from Ekman himself to see if he remembers some details about this supposed image; however, even if we could somehow contact him, there is the fact that his memory of it was already vague when he wrote that message over 23 years ago.

On a related note, I think the following question is so similar to the one of this topic that it's hardly worth a separate topic.  It is "a queston for French readers" and is about this picture from Picsou Magazine #102 (August 1980):

   

Does anybody knows the context of this picture? I know it's from "Voilà le facteur" (some sort of reader's mail column with questions and answers, I guess), but I would like to know how was this image presented to the readers, and what it is written just before and after this image. Also, is she referred as Della, Dumbella or Thelma?