Strobl (was: From RoC)

Anders Engwall Anders.Engwall at eua.ericsson.se
Tue Jun 28 11:37:59 CEST 1994


Way back in April, oLe 'RoC' Reichstein Nielsen (lrn at daimi.aau.dk) wrote
something that I should have responded to *long* ago:

> WARNING: highly inflammable material:
> =====================================
>   Jan Lund Thomsen, who may still be lurking out there, has elevated a
> phrase of mine to A Quote. It goes "Nobody likes Tony Strobl!"

Well, he's wrong! And there's at least one lurker out there who agrees
with me on this one...

>   Not one to speak ill of the dead, or even the mortal, I'd like to
> elaborate on that: The recent tribute to Tony Strobl in WDC&S #592 and
> D&M #25, both of which I have yet to see, perpetuates the American
> publishers' obvious preference to old and tried material.

So, what *did* they choose to reprint? See, there's Strobl and then there's
*Strobl*... Whereas I find his artwork from the fifties and early sixties
rather appalling, his work from roughly 1964/65 and after that works just fine
with me. This *could* have something to do with nostalgia, but hey.

The scripts he had to work with were unfortunately of very uneven quality.
Contrary to common belief, some were great. The ones RoC mentions, for
instance:

>   I would rather have seen some of the numerous Studio stories from ca.
> 1970 with Scrooge as a newspaper editor, Donald and Feathry as his un-
> enthusiastic bullpen, and Daisy as a meter maid.

Ahh, yes! *Now* you're talking... These are some of my favourite non-Barks
stories.

> Just as fictive as the
> Duck Tales show, these stories are, with no quality judgment implied,
> simplistic and trivial; a comic book version of the TV sit-com usually
> dismissed offhand as typical bad, or complete lack of, taste.
>   They do, however, within the limits of the set-up, excell in stringent
> plots, ironic comments, and absurd events, otherwise unknown to Disney
> comics.

And this is why I like them so much. May I add that IMO the unusually sharp
wit of the scripts lends a more "adult" feel to these stories than there is in
any other Disney comics I've seen.

However, the qualities mentioned above are not featured only within this
newspaper office set-up. There were several other stories with equally witty
scripts published in Sweden ca 1969-72 (S-coded? Hard to tell as story codes
weren't printed in Sweden until 1972). Many of them included that bearded
hillbilly character that doesn't seem to have a name in English
("Skogs-Ola" in Swedish, "Urtigao" in Portuguese). I wish I could refer to
these more exactly, but the swedish index (sweden.dbl) is far from complete,
and the s-code index (s.dbl) is even less enlightening (It's fun trying to
decrypt all those Dutch titles, though!). Ah, well...

> ("Engage flame shield, Lieutenant!" "Aye-aye, Commander!")

You said it!

Anders Engwall				Email: Anders.Engwall at eua.ericsson.se
ELLEMTEL Utvecklings AB			Voice: +46 8 727 3893
[lvsj|, Sweden				Fax: +46 8 727 42 20
"Faktiskt {r definitionen ganska lyckad. Den {r extremt godtycklig."




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