Disney-comics digest #214.

[Gary Leach]

DON and DAVID:

I suppose, given our past and even current inclination to modify the past to 
make it possible to reprint it in the present, we could change that note in 
Taliaferro's HD&L introductory strip, but Disney simply won't pass it now. 
Doesn't even matter if Gladstone itself had reprinted it before, we can't 
print it NOW. An awful lot of what we do that seems inexplicable to our 
readers boils down to just that.

One form of revisionism we have on occasion practiced has a recent example in 
the Murry-drawn Phantom Blot story that featured Blot, Mickey, Donald and 
Scrooge, and appeared in a recent Donald & Mickey (I don't remember which one 
at the moment, they all blur together for me most of the time). In this case, 
we decided this very rare crossover in its original form would not play as 
well to today's audience as it might if we tweaked the dialogue a little. So 
we tweaked. Reception has been mixed, as expected. The question that remains 
is: is trying to improve the past, for whatever reason, any more justifiable 
than suppressing it?

Just thought I'd throw that out.

By the by, in case anyone thinks Gladstone does little more than play fall guy
to the Disney powers-that-be, I should mention that we are also hardened 
veterans of this roadshow and have developed a few little tricks of our own. 
Getting the license BACK, for example...

After that bit of gleeful pomposity, I close.