News from Thom Roep

[Harry Fluks]

I talked with Dutch editor Thom Roep on the phone today. He was very busy, but
he could answer a few of my questions:

1. Daan Jippes has stopped re-inking Barks Junior Woodchucks stories, because
   he has no time. (Busy working for Eurodisney, I guess.) The last one,
   "Gold of the '49ers", will be published in Holland in week 25.
   Thom is trying to get Daan to do more stories. Other countries have
   discovered the stories and are now asking for more.

2. The French page of "Darkest Africa" (where Per and David were talking about)
   was copied from an issue of the Danish fanzine "Carl Barks & Co".
   It seems that a lot of Swedish fans have an original copy of the MOC
   comic. One of them is Horst Schro"der.


3. Holland will publish Don Rosa's Life of Scrooge in the monthly DD Extra.
   Part 1 (Buckaroo..Badlands) will be in issue #7. (Issue #6 will
   contain "Fortune on the Rocks")

   One remark of Thom Roep about Rosa's and Van Horn's artwork: "It's 
   2-dimensional. Just like the work of Reiche, Gulbransson and others."
   (OK, this is the last Roep remark I will make about Rosa's artwork.
   Discussion closed.)

4. About the stories Rosa did for Holland: the Dutch whited out some of
   Rosa's backgrounds (with approval of Don). So the H-coded stories are
   *not* the original versions...

5. The Spanish studios are a real mess. When they say that a story was inked
   by Cesar, this is in fact the same artist that is called King by another
   studio. Moreover, most of the Spanish stories are made by more than one
   artist: there are "ghost artists" doing backgrounds etc.
   Finding out who did what is not easy, if not impossible.

6. Freddy Milton is still doing work for Holland. But they let him do only
   the layouts and pencils, and let some (anonymous) Spanish do the inking.
   Milton is very good in layouting, but his inked stories just don't look
   right. According to Roep.

7. Barks' non-Disney comic stories (Our Gang, Barney Bear & Benny Burro)
   seem to have been published in German, in 2 (or 3) hardcover editions
   (Ehapa Comic Collection). Does anyone know more about this? It would
   be nice to have a copy of those stories...

--Harry

Harry Fluks                      ()_()     Dutch Disney comics freak
PTT Research, Leidschendam (NL)   (_)      H.W.Fluks at research.ptt.nl 
"Yeah... I've _heard_ of coral barques!"