Disney-comics digest #301.

Don Rosa 72260.2635 at CompuServe.COM
Sat Apr 16 05:55:47 CEST 1994


JAMES:
	Whoaa! You are quite incorrect there! As I was saying, Disney
may hold legal ownership of the characters and the material produced
concerning same... but they do NOT have control (at least, they have no
feasible way of exerting it) over the comic book stories from somebody
like Egmont. Perhaps it's Egmont's track record of producing quality
material... perhaps it's that Disney is LOST when it comes to
understanding who these characters are except as the mere empty-shell
"actors" they use them as... perhaps Disney feels thay have 10,000 more
important things to do than approve thousands of pages of material that
never even appears in America... perhaps Europe is too far away? They DO
keep a firm grip on Gladstone, seemingly out of pure spite considering
how little control they exert on any other comic publisher in the world.
	Also, it's not unusual that you can't quite grasp this -- no
matter how many times I spell it out for people familiar with American
comics, they always seem to think it's so fantastic that I must be
kidding them. No, Disney does NOT own my art or any other freelancer's
art, nor do they CLAIM they do. They can't possibly own physical
material that they have never paid for nor which the owner has ever
agreed has been sold. The case is that publishers are told by Disney to
simply NOT RETURN such art... and since there are so few freelance
Disney artists outside of art studios (whether it's comics art studios
like Vicar or Diaz or Branca or Scarpa or any of those, or it's
commercial art studios), there's never been an uproar about it. It's
flatly illegal but they get away with it since everyone allows them to.
The rest of the American comic industry has never been interested in
helping me out in this regard since they know my situation can't effect
the sweet deals they are now guaranteed, so why should they get
involved? No, Disney does NOT own, nor do they claim to own, the
artwork.

	What do the Paperinik fans think of my "Super Snooper Strikes
Again"? Not many of them have ever seen ANY of my work. They have
nothing but digest-type Disney books in Italy (other than some Barks
reprint series), so the Italians never see my work nor any comic book
style Disney stuff (or so I'm told). But then, I guess the many readers
of the Scandanavian Italian-reprint-digests see my stories; I don't know
what they think, but I do know that they understand that the comic books
and the digests are like two different "universes" of Disney stuff --
sorta like DuckTales is to us.

	And it's not "Feathery", but FETHRY; I assume it's a British
name that they use since it sounds like "feathery".

GLADSTONE CIRCULATION FIGURES:
	I suddenly realized the answer to the paradox of these
much-too-high circulation figures found in Gladstone's first set of
"statement-of-ownership"s. We KNOW that these Disney comics are not
selling 160,000 copies per issue in America! It's more like half that
many, if not 1/4 that many.
	But the deal is that Gladstone prints 160,000 copies, sells
what they do in direct sales, and turns over a certain percentage of
the run to MARVEL. Marvel then must do what they can to sell those
issues on the newsstands, but they cannot return any of those issues to
Gladstone and therefore the entire print run is SOLD as far as
Gladstone is concerned. Note the line concerning "number of issues
returned unsold: 0"!!! This would seem to be a sweet deal for Gladstone
-- to be guaranteed to sell 160,000 copies of everything per issue
would seem to guarantee a nice profit and a rather successful (by
modern American standards) line of comics; but I dunno how much or
little Marvel pays for their portion of the run. Knowing Disney, the
deal might well be that Gladstone must give them to Marvel for FREE --
I wouldn't put it past Disney to demand something as unfair as that. It
would be their style.
	So, we really have NO idea how the Gladstones are selling by
just looking at those statement-of-ownerships. But just judging from the
level of interest I see between now and the Gladstones of 7-8 years ago,
I don't think they are selling all that well, due to how much Disney
Comics ruined the market for them.




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