Please Gladstone/Gemstone, not again...

Eta Beta eega at supereva.it
Mon Dec 22 11:44:25 CET 2003


DANIEL, JOHNATHAN

>I'm sorry for being so hot-headed, but I'm thinking of all the money I'm 
>paying to get the same stuff over and over again.

Well, I thought Gemstone deserved a few months of adjusting
before making a comment myself on this, but it seems the
time has come...

And I agree with you guys, too, on more general terms than
"just" the Barks re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-reprints...

And no, I'm not exaggerating, I really have up to TEN reprints
of some Barks' stories, and I bet I'm not the only one...

It is fair to say that a european point of view is probably
not very important in Gemstone's plans at the moment, of course
we've read most of what they're currently publishing YEARS
ago, here on the other side of the Pond (and, more often than not
in my case, didn't like them much the first time 'round...)

I willingly make exceptions for Don Rosa, whose stories in the
original language are worth the horrible (still from a european
point of view) price of the comics by themselves, and for Cesar
Ferioli and William Van Horn, whose stories are a bit mistreated
in their italian publications, unfortunately.

Another artist I like a lot is Noel Van Horn, and again we don't
get much of him here in the peninsula.

So, I DO appreciate a good part of what Gemstone does at the
moment, but I'm still hoping for a change rather sooner than
later...

I think the all-time classics of comics should be reprinted
regularly for the sake of the younger generations, there should
actually be a LAW which enforces that for publishers, and
government funds to back it, and Barks certainly belongs to the
category, but the ideal format for this kind of reprint should
be the album/book chronological collection, not the "regular"
comic.

I too advocate the reprint of the "lesser" classics, Murry, Wright,
Strobl, Bradbury, Taliaferro, and more Hubbard, please, seeing
Fethry on an american comic after all these years was such a
joy...

Gottfredson is out of the picture for the moment, as Gary explained
some time ago, for... bureaucratical reasons (sigh!), but that is,
again, album/book material, not for comics (imho, of course), also
because of the strip format.

And some european classics should find a place in there, I won't
mention again Scarpa (oops... just did... :-), but there's also
Bottaro, and Carpi, here in Italy, who wrote pages of history
in Disney comics... and I'm not referring to the "grey area"
of their Studio Program collaborations, the stories already
published by Gemstone of Scarpa, for instance, are not altogether
bad, but still not representative of the real greatness of the
author.

I think some of the british material from the '50s could be
very interesting to see again, too, that's stuff which was NEVER
reprinted anywhere, afaik, and some artists like Reynolds, Ward
and Neilson are very good.

But what I really hope for a not too far future is that Gemstone
would make their own production... the authors would be mostly
the same, of course, and quite a few of them are American anyway,
after all, but I'm sure the "atmosphere" of an american-produced
story would be somehow different from what the same authors would
do for a european publisher... dunno, maybe I'm not making sense,
but I have this feeling...

And this could boost the chances of having NEW american authors
in the future...


In the end, I still have mixed feelings about the current Gemstone
line, to which I subscribe in whole, that's 5 monthly titles plus
the specials... man, that's A LOT of money, again from a european
point of view, for appreciating about a half of every comic book,
and not reading the rest at all...

For the moment being I've only cut the digest DDA, it's about
one third of a "Topolino" at five times the price, and it really
doesn't make economical sense (must be admitted that a good half
of a "Topolino" is ads, though... and I don't buy that either :-)

But I'll keep the rest going for some more time, in hope and
trust to the Gemstone staff goodwill.


Cheers!

Eta Beta


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