Something more on Italian Disney Comics from an Italian cartoonist.

[deckerd@agcs.com]

> 
> >But I CAN tell you that none of your
> >stories, and no Italian Disney comic stories, have ever been published in
> >America.
> 
> Dear Don, since five or six years Italian Disney stories are published in
> the USA: e.g. on Goofy Adventures you may find stories written by Bruno
> Sarda (from Turin, Italy, the creator of Arizona Goofy) and drawn by Massimo
> De Vita and others, and Gladstone published stories written and drawn by
> Romano Scarpa (Venice, Italy). 

Huh? What was Don thinking? There were several Italian stories published
during Gladstone Phase I alone, including the Phantom Blot's Double Mystery
(which I translated from a German version because the original Italian
couldn't be obtained on short notice) and a long Romano Scarpa story about
Donald Duck at the South Pole. Disney Comics published several more,
such as the Arizona Goof and the Scrooge Money Ocean two-parters. By the
way, the original Italian name of Arizona Goof was "Indiana Pipps," Pippo
being the Italian name for Goofy. The American editor thought that "Indiana
Goof" would be _too_ close to Indiana Jones, and changed it to Arizona Goof.
I get the idea that the rule of thumb for parody characters like that is
that you can do just about anything _once_, but there was always the
chance that the character might prove popular enough for return appearances
and you'd want a name that wouldn't lead to trouble. And Gladstone Phase II
has published Romano Scarpa's Lentils of Babylon and the ancient 1930s
Donald Duck on Mars story.

A number of Italian Disney stories have in fact been published in the
United States. I wish there could be more, but the Disney comics market
is small here, and the publishers (well, Gladstone) only have so many
books and so many pages. That's why translators have to have other jobs
to make a living...

--Dwight Decker