OK, now I'm going to call this thread back to its original purpose! Anyone else have favorite Christmas covers to share?
(This is what I get for mentioning the Dutch version of that Christmas cover! Not that I'm not happy to get the lowdown from Scroogerello on the Dutch editors' personae non gratae....)
OK, now I'm going to call this thread back to its original purpose! Anyone else have favorite Christmas covers to share?
(This is what I get for mentioning the Dutch version of that Christmas cover! Not that I'm not happy to get the lowdown from Scroogerello on the Dutch editors' personae non gratae....)
One of my new year's resolutions should be to stop going off topic all the time!
Anyway, since you said Christmas illustrations count as well, I just remembered that Arild Midthun does a Duckburg Christmas Calender illustration for the Scandinavian Disney comic magazines every year, which are always great.
(Notice the Lemming from Barks' comic in the bottom right corner!)
I can't find a comprehensive list of all the different illustrations, but this INDUCKS-search seems to include most of them
Cool, Scroogerello! Those were fun to look through! The one which shows the JW Grand Mogul hanging a medal on the tree reminds me of my favorite new Christmas comics find from overseas this year: Jaako Seppälä & Marco Rota’s "Advent Calendar" one-pagers. Here's the one with the JW Grand Mogul. The one where Grandma, HDL and Scrooge are making gingerbread houses is my favorite. Though I also love the "Letters to Santa" one--but that one people won't be able to figure out from the art alone, you have to be able to read the text.
Those one-pagers are neither covers nor illustrations, so now I'm off-topic! Back on-topic: in my childhood, my favorite Disney Christmas cover by far was the one from Dell's Christmas Parade 7, the one that showed the Ducks and Mice inside a single house on the night before Christmas.
GeoX talks on his blog about his fondness for a good Christmas tableau within (usually the last panel of) a story. That got me thinking about my favorite Christmas tableau *panels*, and the first two I thought of were both Vicar's: the final panels of Hedman's Christmas Magic (with the triple turkeys!) and of Katz & Anderson's All's Well (Christmas in GD's barn). I don't even like the latter story all that much--it involves those execrable Cinderella mice--but I do love that last scene. Sorry I can't scan the panels and post them here!
My favorite Christmas illustration is the Don Rosa centerfold--so many jokes in it! But it's not as crowded as his Christmas "inedits" or the 60-year-anniversary-of-Scrooge Christmas page (though I do much enjoy those, too!). The two pages give him room to breathe. And he wasn't trying to fit in all the characters, or a whole bunch of stories, on this one.
And finally, there's a series of French one-pagers starring Launchpad (i.e.), which also occasionally use Donald, and, that I know of, never featured any other DT-specific characters like Doofus or Webby. Most strikingly, these don't even bear the DuckTales logo — INDUCKS has them down as DuckTales stories, but they seem to have declared this purely on the basis that Launchpad is in them. Which is, you know, fair enough, but when INDUCKS determines DuckTaleness by presence or absence of Launchpad, it becomes helplessly tautological to try and find any non-DT stories with Launchpad.
I am not sure if we even need any Duck Tales subseries in Inducks.
There's a list of stories with Duck Tales as "hero":
Subseries are used to link group of stories when there is no other way to do that. For instance, "puzzling story" are stories with games embedded (there are many other examples).
But apart for "hero", it is difficult to define exactly what one means by "Duck Tales story" indeed.
I thnk I'll have to go with Barks's A Christmas For Shacktown. It was the first that popped into my mind when seeing the thread title... and it always puts me in a jolly mood, maybe most of all because it makes me think of the great story it illustrates. (I do wish Barks could have made a cover for "Letter to Santa", though.)
Yes, Mesterius, I also often have a hard time distinguishing between covers I love for themselves as art, and covers I love because I feel so happy when I think of the story they represent!
I note that none of the covers drawn for "Letter to Santa" is very satisfying. And Rosa's illustration of it is about the least Christmassy of all Christmas cover/illustrations, in its "feel"! Nobody's happy in that one, not even Santa! Though Bruno's cover for ZP is just as bad. Of course they're accurate to the story, but it would still be possible to create a cover image that isn't quite so sour. In the context of the story, the conflict between Donald and Scrooge is funny, but it doesn't come across that way to me in such images.
Ugh, that Rosa cover is just depressing! And the Bruna cover is rather disturbing too, especially with the nephews sweating like crazy. None of them captures the hilarity of the story. (Though, I generally don't care much for Rosa covers illustrating Barks stories in any case.)
Egmont in Norway seemed to acknowledge the lack of a decent cover illustration for "Letter to Santa" when they reprinted the story as a self-contained comic book together with Donald Duck & Co#51-52/2012. For that reprint, they simply used Barks's fantastic splash page opening as the cover. Not perfect, but it actually works rather nicely... except, of course, that you get the exact same page over again when you open the book.
Ugh, that Rosa cover is just depressing! And the Bruna cover is rather disturbing too, especially with the nephews sweating like crazy. None of them captures the hilarity of the story. (Though, I generally don't care much for Rosa covers illustrating Barks stories in any case.)
Egmont in Norway seemed to acknowledge the lack of a decent cover illustration for "Letter to Santa" when they reprinted the story as a self-contained comic book together with Donald Duck & Co#51-52/2012. For that reprint, they simply used Barks's fantastic splash page opening as the cover. Not perfect, but it actually works rather nicely... except, of course, that you get the exact same page over again when you open the book.
Yeah, if I were forced to choose among the currently available options, I guess I'd go with Jippes--but in an ideal world I'd commission a new one from Freccero!