Rosa album in Holland

Fluks, H.W. H.W.Fluks at kpn.com
Mon Dec 10 19:12:15 CET 2001


Last week, the Dutch album OOM DAGOBERT #66 has come out. Title: "Het
verschrikkelijke oplosmiddel" (The Terrible Solvent).

This is the first publication by "Sanoma Uitgevers b.v.". This is
(apparently) the new name of VNU Tijdschriften: this company was taken over
by Sanoma in Finland. (Only last week I bought a pocket book that was still
published by VNU.)

The cover is a recreation of an American cover, which was originally made
for a completely different story. Maarten Janssens redrew it, and tried to
make it look "as Rosa as possible"...

The album contains reprints of Rosa stories (from DD Extra), plus text
pieces and copies of French illustrations.

In the introductory text, they introduce "Keno Don Rosa", and then talk
about "Don Rosa" for the rest. It occurred to me that the Dutch editor may
actually think that "Don Rosa" is a surname.

On one page, 4 "French" illustrations are shown. Every illustration has a
small text explaining which Barks story it refers to. Unfortunately, the
wrong texts are with the wrong illustrations...

On another page, they reprint (most of) a Picsou poster: the one showing a
gallery of Scrooge+Mickey+Donald drawings. The accompanying text says:
"For the French monthly "Picsou Magazine", Don Rosa made this illustration,
which was added as a poster to the magazine. They wanted to make clear that
Mickey Mouse should actually play a role just as big as the one of the
popular Donald, Uncle Scrooge, and the other Duckburg inhabitants. In Walt
Disney's case, the success started with this mouse, and without Mickey
Donald Duck would probably never have existed..." [Bad translation by me -
HF]

I haven't read such nonsense yet in a Dutch Disney album.

It's debatable if Donald would have existed without Mickey (After all, DD's
debut was without Mickey. Maybe the Silly Symphonies would have become
popular without the MM cartoons).
But apart from that: Don did not draw a single line of this poster for
Picsou! The poster is a compilation of 4 covers that Don did for Gladstone
(for the "WDC in Color" albums). They only contain Mickey because the
Gladstone albums included stories by Donald, Scrooge, and Mickey. The whole
reasoning ("They wanted to make clear") makes no sense at all. I wonder
where they got the idea from. (I'll ask them later this week.)

Anyway, apart from the editorial texts, the album looks beautiful. And it
contains one of my favourite Rosa stories ("A Matter of Some Gravity").

--Harry.



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