Disney-comics digest #515.

[DAVID.A.GERSTEIN]

      Greetings, all.

      ERIC:  Ring them bells!  So "Two in One" has appeared in 
Germany now!  I'll quick phone my chums in Germany and have them make 
appropriate arrangements.  Thanks a LOT.  And from the incantation, 
it sounds great already.  Maybe "Mythological Menagerie" got a bad 
treatment, but I generally like the flavor of the German translations 
very much.

      GEIR:  If you'll toss a copy of that Carl Barks & Co. issue 
into the box with the Gottfredson xerox copies, I'd be immensely 
grateful and will add $3 to the check.  Please remember to send 
the lot to my new, EUROPEAN address:
      David Gerstein, Room 133, Masson House, Pollock Halls, 18 
Holyrood Park Rd., Edinburgh EH16 5AY, Scotland.
      It's rather difficult for me to get in touch with Byron.  It 
would be best for me to wait until you've actually had a chance to 
make the Xeroxes, because he'll want to know when you're going to 
SEND them to him -- I'm sure that'll be his first question.  Or do you 
know an answer to that already?  If so, tell me tomorrow, and I can 
see what I can do right away!

      MARK:  The Comics Journal has an article about Disney comics?  
Hooray!  In what issue?  When?  (I want to have my comic shop order 
it -- they don't get much call for that mag in Scotland)

      DWIGHT:  I always find the Blum and Ault articles interesting 
and enjoyable.  I just simply don't find the stories quite as 
disturbing as they do -- but the elements are there if you want to 
interpret them that way.  I FILL my scripts with "dark" elements, 
hoping to give something suitably grim to fans of that kind of thing. 
In my "Animal Farm" parody (the Pig story) Vicar went along with it a 
bit.  And after I was finished with the script, I sat around trying 
to analyze my subconscious from what I had written.  ;-)
      Many of your translations in the first period of Gladstone were 
simply "intermediate" steps -- you'd translate a Dutch or Italian 
story, and then someone else would do the final "dialogue" on it. 
But now, you both translate and dialogue.  In the case of "The Money 
Ocean," which of the two systems took place?  Did you do a dialogue 
which was adhered to, save that one explanation of Scrooge's 
business enterprises?  Or was your work an intermediate step?
      In Part 1 of "Lentils from Babylon," I simplified Scarpa's 
explanation of something, only to have Gladstone make it MORE 
complicated again.  I hope they don't do that in Chapter 3, when a 
very intricate plot mechanism is revealed and I tried to explain 
things as clearly as possible.
      Regarding use of American film:  There is a German Disney 
comic called DISNEY LIMIT which mixes Duck and Mickey stories with 
Disney Afternoon stories, both from Disney Adventures and from the 
long-gone drove of Disney Comics TV titles.  They have to use 
American film, and the problem is that unlike Egmont film, it has 
unremovable lettering of sound effects and titles on it.  I've seen a 
Roger Rabbit story in one issue with word balloons relettered in 
German, but they just had to stick the German title beside a 
full-color American title, and all the sound effects are in English 
(it's almost eyestrain reading the thousands of them, that are in a 
typical Roger Rabbit story.)

      JORGEN:  You didn't give issue numbers for the reprinted Xmas 
Parade stories -- and I wouldn't mind if you wrote something about 
what they were like, since I don't have any old Xmas Parades.  Why 
buy a 100-page 1951 comic when you can buy a 64-page 1942 comic for 
the same price?  People pay very inflated prices for those giant 
comics.  ;-)