Mostly a (long) answer to Paul Benjamin

Jørgen Andreas Bangor jorgenb at ifi.uio.no
Fri Feb 10 00:10:53 CET 1995



HARRY:
>I seem to remember there was a third one, but I'm not sure. At least it's
>not mentioned in our Database.

Could this third one be the story where Mickey and Goofy are hired to find
that little thing which makes things invisible? It turns out to make itself
invisible... A lot of the story takes place in Venezia (Venice?).
     This story must be the first one of the three, since the first part of 
it is about the training of M&G as secret agents. It's also the only one (as 
far as I know), of these, that have been published in Norway (must have been 
in 1966 or 67).

DAVID:
>This is actually a burro

Which reminds me that we should not forget Benny Burro :-)


PAUL (I think this is the first time I'm the first one to answer a new 
      member, so I use the chance to wish you welcome :-) :
>And what about the European output that I learned of from the Gladstone 
issues?

I'm not really sure what you mean by "the European output", but if you are
wondering about what the production of Disney comics in Europe is like, I
can tell you a little about it. It's _huge_.
     If you get Harry's file "story-codes" from the ftp-site, you can learn
a lot from that.
     It's mainly three European publishers that produce Disney stories:
Egmont (earlier Gutenberghus) in Denmark, GP (earlier Oberon) in Holland
and Disney Italy (earlier Mondadori) in Italy. Of these is Egmont the biggest.
Egmont publishes weekly and monthly (and a lot of other) magazines in most of
Europe and in some African and Asian countries. There are local publishers
(owned by Egmont) in the individual countries that produce the local issues
in the local language. The only one you would find in English is the British 
"Mickey Magazine", which, according to David, isn't very interesting.
     Egmont started production of their own stories (the D-code stories) in
the early seventies, and has since then produced thousand of stories, of
varying quality. Gladstone would never be able to (if they were interested)
to publish all this in English.

Just to illustrate some of "the European output" I can list some of the 
publications we get here in Norway (which gives me the chance to brag about
how lucky we are here, of course :-) 

 * Donald Duck & Co * Weekly magazine, 48 pages.
 * Mikke Mus * Monthly magazine, 33 pages
 * Ole Brumm * Bimonthly (I think), Winnie the Pooh, 33 pages  
 * Onkel Skrue * Monthly digest, Italian stories, 99 pages
 * Mikke Krim * Monthly digest, 99 pages
 * Donald pocket * Monthly pocket book, mostly Italian stories, 256 pages
 * Onkel Skrue pocket * Bimonthly pocket, reprints of Italian stories, 
                        288 pages
 * Dumbo * Four times a year (I think), magazine for children
 * Donald Ducks Store Show * Once a year, reprints of Danish stories, 
                             100 pages
 * Donald Ducks Stjerneshow * Once a year, reprints of Danish stories, 
                               100 pages 
 * Donald Ducks Vintershow * Once a year, reprints of Danish stories, 
                             100 pages
 * Donald Ducks Sommershow * Once a year, reprints of Danish stories, 
                             100 pages
 * Donald Ducks Elleville Eventyr * varying, reprints of monthly magazines
 * Donald Duck fra dag til dag * 1 - 2 times a year, newspaper strips, one 
                                 year per book. 
 * The Golden Books * Once a year, Barks stories, about 200 pages.
 * The White Books * Once a year until last year, many of them consist of
                     Barks and Gottfredson stories.
 * Donald Ducks Julehefte * Once a year, Danish stories, about 50 pages
 * Ingen jul uten Mikke og Langbein * Once a year, Sunday strips, ca. 30 pages
 * Ole Brumm julehefte * Once a year, ca. 30 pages
 * Onkel Skrues julefortellinger * Once a year, replacing the white books,
                                   Italian stories, 256 pages.

In addition to these, which are only comics, there are each year published 
some books with text. Mainly for small children. Hjemmet (which is the 
Norwegian part of Egmont) even has a book club for children, which means 
that the members get two books with Disney stories each month.
     There is also a comic club, which publishes comics in hard cover books,
but these are only reprints, and not all of them are Disney.
 
There were also a couple of album series, but none have been published for
a while. 

Both Don Rosa and William van Horn are working for Egmont now. That's why 
their new stories have D-codes.

BTW: Have I used the word "varying" correctly here?

>>def varying
>varying hare (n)
>   n, any of several hares having white fur in winter

I'm not so sure it was _that_ I meant...


About Marvel and Gladstone.
---------------------------
As far as I have understood (and the American market seems very chaotic to
me) Marvel had a deal with Gladstone, which meant they were (or at least 
should have been) distributing Gladstone's publications to the direct 
market. These issues have the Marvel symbol on the cover. Marvel has nothing 
to do with the production of these, _but_, Marvel is producing their own 
Disney stories based on "The Little Mermaid", "The Beauty and the Beast" 
and "Aladdin". These are monthly titles (started around August last year).
These are hardly discussed here, since they are not based on the so-called
Dell Disney characters.

Hope this was useful :)



   Jorgen



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