Weeklies

[Anders Christian Sivebaek]

I'm gonna start this row of quacking on Iceland, as i just got an
Icelandic (very costy!) weekly from my cousin who was there some weeks
ago. 
The cover corresponds exactly to the danish one from the same week, and
so does the 3 stories inside. They were chosen from the danish issue, I
guess. Special feature would be the backpage telling what's in next
weeks issue. 
I TELL you I couldn't live with such a magazine... 32 pages and only
stories. 
What caught me back in 1990-1991 was the special things in the weekly.
What kept me reading it was the beginning of fact-pages and the keeping
on of publishing Rosa-stories. What makes me subscribe to this day and
years to come is that I have a sort of friendship with this mag who
(yes!) followed me for 11 years now. I can't claim to have grown up
with it. I didn't read it every week in the 80'es as I did in the
90'es, but it brought me to where I am now, so to speak. The danish
weekly of the 70'es and 80'es would have left me quite cold, with only
okay Vicar-stories, no Rosa, and no fact-pages. 

Let's get away from there! (In all respect for possible icelandic
listeners) and go to Finland. The mag here is quite the same at first
look. But then you see: Rosa-covers more often than the other
scandinavian weeklies, special artciles on movies, pin-ups and other
things from Picsou and. Specially made school-time-tables by Don Rosa,
and comments on most new Rosa stories by the author himself. Why, oh
why wasn't I born in Finland, so I could read the darned things? ;-)
Not to mention the 3 soon 4 finnish Rosa-books, but that would be on
another note. 

The dutch weekly is next. It has ducth and egmont-stories, a
letter-page (which only Zio paperone and Komix seem also to have),
funny pages for the child-readers and so on. It seemed to me the
frequency of barks-stories is a bit larger there than in DK, and two
years would be very interesting to me,a fan of the danish Freddy
Milton, as they have comics on the backcover made be this artist, who
strangely does stories for Holland. 

Germany. The most sold comic in many of this countries I mentioned is
the weekly duck-comic, including here, where it is actually a
Mouse-comic. Featuring many duck-stories too. As in Holland the
reader's gorup is considered to be between 7 and 13 or so. That is why
higher people in the company say a feature as the recent blueprints of
the bin shouldn't be in the mag. Apart from that the magazine has
comics, joke and fun-pages, collecting cards for one or another series
everytime (at the moment it's the JW Guide book no. ?) and so on. 

Scandinavia. Even though I have complained about it often, here too, I
do like the mag, and I fear the day when it stops, though it wouldn't
cause much more than a very sad me. This weekly has much the same as
the german weekly, plus a thing I have been calling fact-pages here.
These pages come once in a while, when there's a reason, which would
sometimes be a Rosa-story, a specail Barks-story or some international
event or so. Another kind of these fact-page is the recently started
album of criminals from Duckburg police. So far we've seen Arsene Lupin
(The Rosa-invented thief who wants to be famous - made from an original
hero in french books), Magica and those 3 moneky-looking fellows from
classic Gottfredson-stories. In the time where the egmont-weeklies were
celebrating their jubilees the norwegian and swedish issues also had a
time mashine, stopping every issue in another year, to tell what
special events happen in and outside the weekly at that time. In
Denmark we got posters with excerpts from these, one poster for every
decade. 
As the scandinavian weekly is the most read thing we have of these, and

there's nothing special anymore for the maybe older readers, our weekly
publishes Rosa-stories. 

Unlike the ducth weekly, all these other I've mentioned so far publish
most stories by Rosa. In the following mail where I tell about extras,
I'll tell you what it says on a coming Rosa-story on the german
comic-forum. (and as just say, our weekly publishes Rosa-stories. - I
*hope*
they will do this one too, even though it's said that egmont doesn't
like more 
Lo$ chapters.  

The weeklies in Scandinavia will also hold an extra or an enlargement
from time to time. If you're lucky containing a Barks or Rosa-story.
Scarpa and
Murry are also used here, alongside with Rota. 

BTW I'm not talking about the weeklies from East Europe or southern
europe here. The eastern european comics are much like the danish, but
without the fact-pages as far as i know, - The Italian and greek
weeklies ought to be known to you, as  pocket-sized books publishing
italian stories.

And I forgot the french one. - It's comics and many fun pages. No Rosa,

not in the latest years at least. 


A. C. Sivebaek
acsive at mail.mira.dk