Disney Comics in England

[edge]

The lack of mainstream popularity for Disney comics in North America has been discussed, but I'm wondering why the comics also don't seem to be popular in the UK.

Generally speaking, it seems to be the exception in Europe.

[geox]

I've often wondered about that. It's frustrating for US fans, because if they were as popular as they are in Italy, France, Germany et al, there would be SO MUCH material to choose from. I am sure there are complicated social/historical reasons why they never really took off there, but I must admit I'm having a hard time conceptualizing them.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

It is pretty mysterious to me too. There was once some good original British material in the thirties (including the infamous "Ten Little Mickeys", and a number of strips)… But there were still some comics, just not DUCK comics, later, published in "Mickey Mouse Weekly" I'm thinking notably of the wonderful, wonderful work of Ronald Neilson on "Alice through the Looking-Glass", which you can get scans of on the Disney Wiki (check the picture gallery of Alice). It has painted backgrounds with the characters painted on cells, to look like real animation stills, and it uses number of concept-arts from the first movie.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

There's also another, similarly background-painted story entitled "Mickey Mouse in Clown Island", that's pretty good too, and visually awesome — but INDUCKS doesn't know who it was drawn by and there are a few scans too, but not the whole story.

[edge]

I admit that my curiously is two-fold.

The first being that characters born from an English-language aren't "main stream" in most (all) English-speaking countries - The US, Canada, The UK. Yet they are extremely popular in Nordic/Germanic countries.

The second being a bit of jealousy for not having multiple channels for reading comics - even if it means importing titles.

[Ramapith]

Mar 5, 2016 22:25:30 GMT geox said:

I've often wondered about that. It's frustrating for US fans, because if they were as popular as they are in Italy, France, Germany et al, there would be SO MUCH material to choose from. I am sure there are complicated social/historical reasons why they never really took off there, but I must admit I'm having a hard time conceptualizing them.

As far as I can tell—

Disney comics were quite popular in the UK right up through the 1980s. The main publisher, London Editions, was a division of Egmont, and the material used was then-current Egmont, spiced up with generally clever, funny dialogue. (Not in the style of what we Yanks would know as Disney comics, but on the level of then-current Beano, which was fine for Brits; also, these Disney comics were in full color, at a time when most UK comic books were not, creating a sales advantage.)

London Editions' line was burgeoning in the late 1980s; the WDCS-like weekly "Disney Magazine" was supplemented with Donald-, Pooh-, and Mickeycentric monthlies.

Then—as I understand it, with things as good as they'd ever been, another publisher, Fleetway/IPC, outbid Egmont when the Disney contract was up for renewal in 1991.

Speaking, admittedly, with no inside knowledge, I suspect that Fleetway may have grabbed the Disney brand to marginalize it, for fear that it was cutting into Fleetway's own traditional lines of comics. Fleetway reduced the four comics to one "Disney Weekly"; dumbed-down the localizations to an attempted early grade-school level (making many stories confusing), and filled a vast portion of the magazines with DuckTales and Rescue Rangers material—not the most popular in the UK. Sales evidently stagnated.

Egmont bought Fleetway and there was a relaunch of the magazine, now "Mickey and Friends," once again based around Egmont content; but the product was still hurt by Fleetway's peculiar local decisions, almost all of them adopted with the purported goal of making the magazine "safe" for the parents of toddlers. This eventually involved running an excessive amount of Mickey sitcom stories and late-period Chip 'n' Dale and Madam Mim material—at the expense of the more popular Duck stories and Mickey adventures.

At the last second there was a pivot back to Duck-heavy adventure material, but only after sales had stagnated for another year. Speaking from the outside, I'm unfortunately convinced that a popular series of comics was mistreated until its readers left, simply due to very basic misconceptions about the key Disney audience.

[Matilda]

That is most interesting, David, though also mildly depressing. I didn't realize there had been audience to lose in the UK. My own selfish regret around British Disney comics is that no one seems to have saved them, or if they did, it doesn't occur to them to try to sell them. When I do see that a story I'm interested in has been published in the UK, that rarely means that I'll be able to find a copy for sale. I've only been successful at finding an issue I want a couple of times. MUCH better luck with the Germans or the French, with both stores and individuals selling on eBay. There must be no market for used Disney comics in the UK--no British Disney comics collectors. Part of the problem may be the lack of distinctiveness (for search purposes) in the titles of the comics. It’s much easier to find comics with a search for “Journal de Mickey” than with one for “Mickey and Friends”! Especially given that one never knows whether/how the seller will include the issue number in the header for the listing. German sellers are WAY more predictable on this front.

[The KKM]

Should be noted Fleetway has a history of WAKing with comics that were doing well until they ended up cancelled, just see the popular (at the time) Sonic the Comic that they smothered to death with reprints in the end of the 90's on a misguided notion of "we don't need to make new stories since the old readers have grown up now and the new readers wouldn't have read the old issues!"

So I don't know if Fleetway intentionally grabbed the Disney brand to marginalize it on purpose, or if they just were genuinely incompetent in handling it anyways.

[geox]

All this talk inspired me to revisit the small handful of old British comics I have lying around--two issues of the "Jumbo Book" (Britain's sadly abortive effort at a European-style digest), and the albums containing "The Rain God of Uxmal" and "High Jinks on the Matterhorn" (which bear the awesomely British title "Full Colour Picture Strip Adventure"). And...yeah, the translations ARE all right (although HDL refer to Donald and Scrooge as "uncle"). Certainly nothing like those "Literature Classics," most of which appear to have been machine-translated with little or no human oversight. I may have underrated them initially because the FCPSA albums use such a hideous font. If you can find it, it's totally worth picking up Jumbo Book #2 ("Thrills and Spills"), which contains this Goofy/Tarzan story. It's real vintage, height-of-powers Scarpa, and it's unlikely to ever appear in the US because of the truly regrettable depiction of indigenous people (which, however, is unlikely to be prevalent enough to ruin the story for you). Also, a kind of middling Martina/Carpi story that you may nonetheless get something out of, and "Delta Dimension" and "Kali's Fingernail" with, naturally, inferior localizations to the US printings. Plus: the usual terrible inter-story bridges!

[clapton]

Geo:
Sounds like you should do an American localzation of that Goofy/Tarzan story... Or at the very least upload scans of the British version. Please

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Yes, please. At least the latter. (and if you can make a localization, then both).

[geox]

A translation isn't a bad idea, really, though I'd need to find better-quality source material to scan. But not both scans of British comics AND localizations. Sheesh. I'm not getting paid for this. Though if some eccentric billionaire would LIKE to pay me, I wouldn't say no...

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Well, GeoX, you DID scan "War and Peace" and "That Missing Candelabra", didn't you ? Plus, doing the localization would require scanning the original anyway…

[geox]

Yeah, except that the British version is a low-quality digest thing using the alternating b&w/color thing; it wouldn't be fit for localizing. I'd have to find a higher-quality copy, which would be in a language other than English.

[clapton]

GeoX:
I'm totally down for you translating the Tarzan story! I didn't mean scans and a translation, I meant one of them. And by the way, if I were rich I'd pay ya for it