US Disney comics you want brought back or made

[mickeyanddonaldfan]

Do you wish that IDW or another publisher would bring back defunct Disney comics? I wish that the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (or perhaps Donald and Mickey) titles would be brought back, and to a lesser extent, I would like IDW to make their own revivals of The Beagle Boys, Super Goof, The Junior Woodchucks, Ludwig Von Drake, and some titles from the Four Color series that never became independant comic book titles (Goofy, Pluto, Gyro Gearloose, Grandma Duck, etc.) considering how many Italian stories these characters star in besides just Mickey, Donald, and Scrooge. How about if some series that never existed (at least in the US) got made, such as Fethry Duck, Chief O'Hara (or perhaps Chief O'Hara and Detective Casey), and Peg-Leg Pete? It seems like they're just releasing non-Scrooge-centric stories in Disney Comics and Stories for the time being, but what if that becomes defunct too?

And if they ever decide to stop focusing on Italian stories quite so much, I think a Big/Li'l Bad Wolf and Brer Rabbit comic series would be great.

[RobbK1]

Apr 12, 2020 23:01:54 GMT mickeyanddonaldfan said:

Do you wish that IDW or another publisher would bring back defunct Disney comics? I wish that the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (or perhaps Donald and Mickey) titles would be brought back, and to a lesser extent, I would like IDW to make their own revivals of The Beagle Boys, Super Goof, The Junior Woodchucks, Ludwig Von Drake, and some titles from the Four Color series that never became independant comic book titles (Goofy, Pluto, Gyro Gearloose, Grandma Duck, etc.) considering how many Italian stories these characters star in besides just Mickey, Donald, and Scrooge. How about if some series that never existed (at least in the US) got made, such as Fethry Duck, Chief O'Hara (or perhaps Chief O'Hara and Detective Casey), and Peg-Leg Pete? It seems like they're just releasing non-Scrooge-centric stories in Disney Comics and Stories for the time being, but what if that becomes defunct too?

And if they ever decide to stop focusing on Italian stories quite so much, I think a Big/Li'l Bad Wolf and Brer Rabbit comic series would be great.

I'm working on 2 Bre'r Rabbit stories now, and a Gyro Gearloose, too.  All for Sanoma.  So, they won't be drawn by Italian artists.

[deb]

At this point, I would like to see monthly Disney comics with competent translation and scripting return. But nobody involved cares enough about these books to admit they made a mistake by cheaping out on translation and production. Post-Covid, quality will bring readers back, but if it’s not there, where is the incentive to start picking them up again?

[blot]

I liked the idea of the Showcase series. However the Italian slant on IDW Disney comics ruins them.

[That Duckfan]

I was just reading some WDC&S issues from the Gladstone I and Disney imprint eras. You could get away with a lot more back then -- Gladstone at times was pretty much Dell Reprints Incorporated, but that was before we had three sets of Barks libraries and a Gottfredson library. Access to Disney comics has changed the game a little. You could do another round of brittle mastery stories and Taliaferro strips like Gladstone did in the '90s, but you wouldn't be adding a whole lot to the range of Disney comics in America.

What makes WDC&S such an interesting title is that it's not just a collection of Donald, Scrooge, or Mickey tales. It's always been a showcase of characters outside the Duckverse: L'il Wolf and Bucky Bug stories in the '40s, Grandma Duck in the early '50s, Madam Mim in the '60s, Winnie the Pooh and Gummi Bears in the '80s. At this point, I'd like to say that they should develop some new comics for Disney's current properties... but I've never been the intended audience for any of that. I've only begrudgingly read the above because they were in the latest magazine.

As for other titles, you run into the same problem: most new titles would probably feature predominantly Italian content (which is not a problem -- but ya gotta know when to strike a balance), reprints of old American stories because we can't afford to pay new artists, or the more ordinary Danish and Dutch material. Why pay so much for an American comic when I can get three times as many pages in local pockets/digests? So I don't buy Duck Avenger. I'd love to see an Arizona Goof title, but then, I probably wouldn't buy it anyway.

I may not be the right target demographic for this question...

[Matilda]

So, I *am* the right target demographic for this question... but like Deb, I have no hopes for anything IDW would produce with the current approach to editing, production, story choice and translation. If I were to set aside that reality and dream of well-produced/edited/translated Disney comics returning to the USA, though, I would certainly want a Donald Duck title again. I'd also vote for a Showcase series in which each issue focused on one of the supporting or ancillary characters: Magica apart from Scrooge, Madam Mim, Chip & Dale, Helper (Little Helper Lost!), Paperetta/Dickie (l'ultimo scrigno), Fethry (l'isola senza prezzo), Grandma Duck (Bananas, some of the Korhonen GD Detective series), AMJ (The Substitutes, Robbery on Rosebud Road), HDL (And Then There Were Two), the Junior Woodchucks (a couple of the better stories from the Italian G.M. book), José Carioca, even what I would call "adventurous Daisy" (A Caverna Das Sereias; A Heart-Sized Ruby). That's a year's worth of issues, if it's monthly...or two years, if you alternate with Mouseworld characters!

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

I am currently living in the UK, so no more French cheap magazines like Picsou or  Super Picsou Géant to get a selected look at the current state of European Disney comics for me.  
Traditionally, the UK does not care for Disney comics...yeah, even less than current North America! They are not even very much into manga and anime...it's like HELL ON EARTH!! Someone help me, please, help me! 

Jokes apart, I can now buy the IDW publications that I find in selected bookshops or Amazon UK. The Fantagraphics volumes were already at my disposal when I was in continental Europe, as Amazon seems allowed to sell them everywhere on Earth. (Well, actually one can order the IDW issues from a comic bookshop in Paris devoted to American original issues - as I am sure you can somewhere in Rome and Milan - but that is a pain in the WAK. )
Just today I ordered the trade paperback of The Persistence of Mickey on Amazon UK, among some other comic books of various style and genres to help me survive this quarantine.
So I would be interested in seeing a good revival of Disney US publications! But I think that it may never happen...or happen when life will have pushed me away from here, even further north (Lapponia?).

In an ideal world the big four would be still around: WDCS, DD, MM & US.
The editors could search for the right mix of Dutch, Danish and Italian stuff on DD and US. Then they could go heavy on the Italian Mouse (from the late 80's on) as concerns MM. I mean, there is not much alternative for those three comic books, assuming that they do not want to spend money on producing new original American material. More on this subject in the last paragraph of the post.
As concerns WDCS, me too I think that it should follow the tradition of keeping a significative variety in terms of cast. But I am not sure that the Bad Wolf family or that guy Rabbit would still fit in it. Seriously, folks, how many young readers can potentially care for them? None, I think. Those characters were mostly created for kids of an old time, why having them still around? Not even the (anagraphically) old WDCS collectors still alive ever cared much about them, come on! If we want to follow the same philosophy, but adjusted to modern times, there are so many other modern Disney characters out of the Mickey/Donald universe(s) that could replace them. I don't know you, but I would buy a WDCS issue containing, for instance: a decently selected Donald story from Egmont, a short Italian Mickey story by Casty, a silly Fethry one-pager by Faccini, and then a story featuring, say, Lilo and Stitch. Wouldn't you? Come on, what kind of monster does not love Lilo and Stitch?! They could even exploit the success of Duck Tales 17 or the everlasting fame of Darkwing Duck to bust the sells. Why not? IDW is already producing them! (Although the DT17 stories that I have seen are qualitatively...well...forget about it...)

Has the IDW "showcase" series already been canceled, or is it still around? I do not hold any copy of that, but the idea seems at the same time good and bad.
The idea is good because, well, having a big issue focusing on one character is just quite cool. In Italy they publish so many cheap anthologies of that kind, they are always around in newspaper stands and highway rest areas. They seem to attract the sporadic readers. Although, the sporadic reader in Italy would still be someone who remembers who Fethry or Gladstone are from their childhood. I don't know if the situation is similar in the US. I assume it is not.  
But the idea is also bad if we consider the way comic books are published in the US. What if a certain reader, interested in the series, find themselves with two consecutive issues on characters they don't really like? That's a lost reader, most probably.
So, the showcase would make sense as a collateral series, beside the four big mentioned above, or most of them. Only having the showcase bimonthly and a monthly US was probably a dangerous choice.


In an even more ideal world IDW would start producing freaking new freaking original freaking American stories, like they seem to do successfully with other popular franchises such as the TMNT and Transformers. Which I have not read, but seem to be relatively praised on the web.
No matter how good you select European Disney comics, and how well you localise the dialogues, they will never get a sizeable following in the US. Because those stories are conceived to work only

• in specific markets where each potential reader is familiar with those characters since an early age,
• in weekly relatively voluminous issues containing also a bit of other stuff for kids to read other than comics.

The variety is maybe confusing too. Consider this: the Italian public still rejects Danish stories, and the Danish public barely stands Italian stories in apposite ghetto pocket books. How must feel an American kid seeing a Dutch duck story followed by and Italian duck story in the same issue? Yeah, the knowledgeable nerd expert of Disney comics will rejoice for the variety (and yet, we see many users of the forum complaining of the mix). But I am sorry, the target of the IDW comics must be the exact opposite of us knowledgeable expert of Disney comics. Someone very young, not relatively aged. Someone unaware of who the heck Fethry Duck is, not someone who knows the character because they are nerd enough to buy a lot of early 2000's WDCS issues from eBay(!). To attract these people permanently, according to me, you can only do one thing: refund the American Disney comics tradition from scratches.  


 

[That Duckfan]

In an ideal world, I'd like to take down the old Disney comics & licensing system and start from scratch, because it's antiquated and arcane. Disney comics are a global phenomenon. Disney is a global brand. English is a global language. And yet here we are, still highly dependent on the whims and reach of local/national editors to get access to comics and stories. Disney+, it ain't.

So the licensing system we know originates from the 1920s, when Disney realized the power of Mickey Mouse as a symbol. Somewhere in the early years of the Great Depression, Disney captured the spirit of youthful hope and optimism, bottled it, and sold it, liberally issuing out licences to producers of other goods to make stuff with Mickey's face on it. You could find Mickey on everything, from colouring books to gas masks. And comic books.
In the early days, the Mickey Mouse comic strip was produced in what was then the budding publicity department. It's astounding to me how many countries published the Mickey strip in the first year (!) of publication, in the midst of the Depression. But of course. Disney was in Hollywood, the movie distribution capital in the world. Most countries had little to no movie production of their own. So Mickey Mouse spread like wildfire. But that feeling that the comics are just an extended arm of the publicity department, that's never really gone away.
This explains to me Disney's attitude toward the comics: not as a nurterer of new talent, but overly protective of her image. In the view of the mother company, Disney comics play the same role as the Disney theme parks, but in print instead of in 'real life'. They are a derivative of the Core Properties developed in the studios, and mainly exist to keep the Disney spirit in the public eye, to give people that unblemished experience. Incidentally, the exact same thing is true for Disney video games, most of which are not very good as a result. This in spite of the fact that the Disney theme parks are essentially a 1950s idea of a video game, invented before computers. I'm telling you, if Walt had been alive in the 1980s and 90s, he would have been all over that.

Anyway.

One of the big saving graces of Disney comics has always been the fact that Disney never really paid much attention to it. This allowed licensers to adapt the material to their own country. One of the wonderful things about Inducks it how it allows us a glimpse of all those budding local comic traditions in countries that didn't make it: Belgium in the '50s, the UK in the '30s, those pre-war comic newspapers they had in France and Italy, etc. Not all of them made it, unfortunately, and even the USA hasn't been able to sustain a consistent flow of new homespun American comics since the 1980s. This deregulation has led to a situation where three publishers have essentially taken over the market: Denmark, the Netherlands, and Italy. All three have a strongly-rooted popular readership, but there are some key differences.

Italy is the most self-contained of the three. This has has created a strongly insular tradition: Italian Disney comics arguably derive more influence from the Italian comic scene than from the international Disney comic scene. It's a thriving tradition, but it's not for everyone. And due to the anthological way Italian comics are published abroad, you're left with the feeling that you never quite get the whole joke -- whether you've read one comic or hundreds. 
Egmont is in many ways the opposite. There are many countries that receive their comics from Egmont. This leads to excellent international cooperation: a publication can be prepared within the Egmont offices, and all foreign offices need to do is translate them. As a result, Egmont has the most diverse and international group of artists. But this, in turn, makes collaboration between artists more difficult (scripts are processed in English, so no local idiom), leading to a mishmash of styles unified by a kind of internationalist blandness. If Italy isn't for everyone, Egmont will make sure that it is.
And then there's America, where comics as a popular medium are virtually dead. Anyone buying Disney comics at this stage has got to be some kind of fan. America, the "home" of Disney comics, is virtually orphaned. The most notable publications in America are attempts to make their decades-old backlog more readily available in the form of collections and libraries... which is further complicated by the fact that most people who'd be interested in buying, say, the Don Rosa Library in the original language, are not American! With virtually no solid base to support local artists with, publishers of the monthly magazine are forced to print stories from abroad or promote the latest publicity comic from Disney's Core Properties, while Burbank watches closely to see that there are no irregularites...

We have now arrived at ridiculous situations where the most thoroughly researched collections of Carl Barks and Don Rosa are only available in Scandinavia, the most famous underground fanzine (Der Donaldist) is German, and the most well-documented comics tradition is Italian. And here's the cinch... America's biggest comics publisher, Marvel, is owned by Disney...

---

All it takes, in my opinion, is for one Disney executive to realize the potential. It shouldn't take too much. Make a deal with American supermarket chains to reintroduce your comics to newsstands, to make them accessible to kids (and parents!) once again. Introduce a small section of comics in Disney Stores, so they'll finally sell something that's not pure fluff. Disney already has a regular publishing arm -- attract some talent, put together an editorial team, and launch Disney Comics Publishing International. And then... give them the freedom and the resources to come into their own. They had some good ideas in 1990-93, believe it or not. Just don't go all in expecting the big bucks, that's just not how the comic business works. Remember the Micro-Ducks. A business is a business, no matter how small.

And then, maybe then, can we talk about new comics.

[deb]

What I personally would like to see in Disney comics? The return of something like the Gemstone books, the digest-sized Adventures books and Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and the annuals. A well-curated selection of material in a good-sized collection. Maybe follow the lead of DC’s 100 Page Giant series that is being sold at Walmart.

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

That Duckfan has written the post of the year according to me.

We all know by heart what he has written. (By 'we' I mean us the 'tiny international fandom').
But it is good to have it written down so clearly. You know, in case that 'one executive with the potential to realise it' happens to pass by...

Edit: ok, there is a passage that I do not completely agree on:

In an ideal world, I'd like to take down the old Disney comics & licensing system and start from scratch, because it's antiquated and arcane.

Well, I think you can let the Danish, Dutch and Italians keep their version of the Disney comic universe. They produce the stuff mostly for their own internal market. (Yes, the internal market of Egmont is transnational, but you know what I mean...) If a new line of well written Disney-original-non-licensed comics would appear someday, I am sure that these European countries would happily consume those too. Then if this phantomatic hypothetical new line would then be so good to destroy the competition of this local Disney comics on their own local field, well, then these European traditions would die peacefully and naturally on their own. I do not see how suppressing them would help Disney in making their own Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse comics. 

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Apr 15, 2020 12:56:00 GMT deb said:

Maybe follow the lead of DC’s 100 Page Giant series that is being sold at Walmart.

Just to understand, what kind of comics are sold in Walmart and similar moles today in the US?

Can you find your typical Amazing Spider-Man monthly issue? Or any other Marvel and DC issues? Can you find Image, IDW or Dark Horse issues?

In other words, are all the "monthly issues" from majors (even the aforementioned independent like Dark Horse) conceived to be sold beyond the comic book shops?

[niko]

Someone finish please all these Reprints of the classic newspaper Comic strips like Treasury, Donald, Mickey, and so on. I would buy them even for the double Price... most likely...🙏

[deb]

Apr 15, 2020 13:43:13 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Apr 15, 2020 12:56:00 GMT deb said:

Maybe follow the lead of DC’s 100 Page Giant series that is being sold at Walmart.

Just to understand, what kind of comics are sold in Walmart and similar moles today in the US?

Can you find your typical Amazing Spider-Man monthly issue? Or any other Marvel and DC issues? Can you find Image, IDW or Dark Horse issues?

In other words, are all the "monthly issues" from majors (even the aforementioned independent like Dark Horse) conceived to be sold beyond the comic book shops?



  

The 100 Page Giants are a mix of reprints and new material, printed on lower quality paper than the glossy stock that has become the norm in standard direct-market comics. www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dc-partners-walmart-100-page-giant-comic-book-line-1122484

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Apr 15, 2020 13:57:21 GMT niko said:

Someone finish please all these Reprints of the classic newspaper Comic strips like Treasury, Donald, Mickey, and so on. I would buy them even for the double Price... most likely...🙏

In case, besides your money, you don't care about the language too, all the non-continuity Mickey Mouse strips by Gottfredson (1955-1975) were published 11 years ago in the Italian library of Gottfredson, which was later translated also in French by the publisher Glénat. The Italian version was conceived to be given away as a weekly supplement to a certain newspaper, not to be sold independently in book shops, so you can only find it on eBay. The French version is an hardcover for bookshops, and volumes should still be around new. Hope that helps.

[niko]

Thank you Monkey-Feyerabend,
i know Glenat stopped the Mickey l´age d´or with volume 12 (that is Gottfredson Mickey in the year 1957),
and the italian version - i know also - is for me too hard to understand.
But I admire the italians, they are really eager to publish Gottfredson very often, wow.