Colouring

[Per Starb{ck]

Jens Abrahamsson wrote:
> I have noticed that the colouring differs between the Scandinavian
> Duck magazine and the American ones.

Not only that, but there are differences within the same country as
well, so that e.g., American reprints often don't have the same
colouring as the original.  You might think it would save work to
reuse a colouring when it's done, but I guess it isn't.

In Mickey and Donald #5 there was a letter that asked why Gladstone
didn't always use the original colouring.  The answer was that with
rare exceptions they *did* use the original colour schemes, but to do
that they teared up two copies of the old comics to send to the colour
separators.  When they didn't use the original colour scheme it was
because they didn't have access to any old (probably valuable) stuff
they wanted to tear apart, or they thought the original colouring was
bad.

This is not entirely true though, because Gladstone made at least one
consistent change.  They made the stripes on Donald's jacket yellow
instead of white, as before.  On covers they were always yellow, but
the jacket was blue instead of black!  Donald's nephews are also often
coloured in a strange way on covers.

The colourists in different countries seem to have created their own
traditions.  In Scandinavia those stripes are blue, Donald's car is
red instead of yellow and the Beagle Boys always have red sweaters.

> It seems that the American colourists do their job better. For
> example they colour Donald's eyes light blue, while the Scandinavian
> duck usually has got white ones.

Disney started with the light blue eyes when they took over.  I don't
think the ducks have ever had anything else than white eyes in the
comics before.  They did have light blue eyes on the screen though, so
I guess that's why they changed it.  I think it looks a bit strange,
but I guess that's just because I'm not used to it.

> I would like to know how come the colouring differs between the
> countries, and I'm pretty sure you guys know the answer! :-)

Well, I didn't, really, but I tried to answer anyway. :-)

Other stuff: Thanks to Rich for info on Disney Adventures and to Harry
for the Rosa list.  Comments later...
--       "
Per Starback, Uppsala, Sweden.  email: starback at student.docs.uu.se