DCML Digest Issue 15

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Mon Jun 14 22:10:14 CEST 2004


> From: Chris Hilbig <chilbig1 at satx.rr.com>
> Subject: Re: Credits
> Mr. Roep seems to come off a little short-sighted.

Of course it's short-sighted as book and storybook publishers have always
known and comic publishers discovered in the 60's, and all Disney publishers
(except one) discovered over 10 years ago. When you give the readers a
direct link to the writers and artists, the stories become FAR more popular.
One of the reasons my work is so popular is, I know, because I was early on
given the first printed credits after Barks' and I'm still constantly given
more attention & promotion by the publishers and offered opportunities for
communication with the readers via texts, etc... so the readers identify
better and relate to me as a real person... making my work apparently
wildly, albeit undeservedly, popular.
It's also common sense to see that the reason the credits are being still
withheld by one publisher has nothing whatsoever to do with this ridiculous
notion that it maintains some bubble of the Ducks being actual beings for
the toddlers. As I say, this is proven by the fact that the 3-year-old
toddlers who are having the stories read to them, obviously can't read the
credits, and wouldn't be fazed by them if they could. And if an editor says
that those creator credits are simply being passively left out because so
few people care, you KNOW this is blatant baloney. That's not a logical
reason for leaving out the names of the people who do the work, while those
same Dutch issues list dozens and dozens of names of the editors and
assistant editors and translators and copy editors and etc., etc., all the
way down to even the marketing people who have nothing whatsoever to do with
the comic's contents at all. If there are "only 200 readers" who care about
who wrote the actual stories that are the entire purpose of the comic, its
very reason-for-being, how many readers care about the names of the
editors?! So... why bother to list those names? A better answer to that
question for the editor would have been "Sorry, I gotta catch a bus, gotta
go, bye!"
Listing credits of the people creating the stories is a common courtesy to
the main contributors and that alone should be enough reason for it. But in
all other forms of publishing, for centuries, in all of those children's
storybooks, even about Santa and the Easter Bunny, the full
writer/illustrator credits are always given due to that courtesy *and* due
to rules that publishers have agreed to in league with publisher guilds,
writers' unions, and more other reasons than I can list. Note that Western
Publishings' decades of "Little Golden Books" were published by the same
company employing the same freelancer writers and artists doing all the work
as published the comics... but every single one of those Disney "Little
Golden Book" storybooks (which were directed at a much *younger* audience
than that reading the comics), those storybooks always gave FULL credits...
the only time Barks' original publisher listed his name was when he did work
for those storybooks. Even the dang *coloring books* from Western gave full
art credits!!!!!! Disney comics were the only creative endeavor where the
writers and artists were not given credit for the work, but that archaic and
unjust era began to die when Gladstone Comics started giving credits and the
other Disney publishers around the world joined modern times around a decade
ago.

As I stated before, the *fact* remains that all Disney publishers *save one*
list all the writer/artist credits, as clearly should be done. If they are
still not giving credits in another Disney comic published in Nepal or
somewhere, I must apologize that I don't know about it.




More information about the DCML mailing list