Disney-comics digest #221.

[David A Gerstein]

	Hi, Folks!

	Gary said:  "Manpower is the #2 reason Gladstone cannot 
publish much of what deservedly should be published of Gottfredson's 
Mickey. The simple gruntwork it takes to make most of the art 
publishable, particularly by today's printing standards, is simply 
beyond our powers today."

	This sounds right, but then how is it in Gladstone's powers to
do that gruntwork with Taliaferro's Sunday strips?  Or the two
Gottfredson Sundays in D&M 20 which HADN'T been reprinted anywhere
before?

	Another easy way to use Gottfredson stuff is to order the old
Western versions.  From WDC&S 81-85 "The Gleam" was published
complete, and in MM BIRTHDAY PARTY 1 (1953) "Love Trouble" got the
same treatment.  I can't say that Dell ever printed any *other*
Gottfredson stories so completely (there are some panels dropped here
and there in others that they printed), but there's two at least.

	As for the others, both GP (ex-Oberon) and Mondadori have used
loads of Gottfredson stuff, reformatting it themselves.  They'd be
quite willing to let you use it as with their own stories.  All Gladstone
would have to do there is restore the dialog.  Bruce Hamilton owns a
set of the complete Gottfredson as published by Horst Schroeder in
Germany -- he told me that himself.  All you'd need to do is take the
set, Xerox the dialog, and paste it in.  That'd be no longer a job
than lettering a foreign story -- in fact it'd take *less* time, since
Xeroxing 26 pages worth of dialog takes less time than to letter it.

	(I assume you can't just use the strips themselves from
Horst's collections -- presumably the art isn't quite up to Disney's
proof quality, having been made from newspapers as opposed to proofs.
But you could indeed use the text, as you did with the Duck stories
"Race to the South Seas" and "Darkest Africa".  It was clear that the
dialog had been photocopied and pasted into the foreign re-inked
versions for those two stories, and I sure didn't mind that.)

	Disney has a lot of old proofs to MM dailies and Sundays in
their Burbank vaults... bound into books, but falling apart.  Is this
the source for the proofs they always used to send you?  Disney also
has negatives to the strips, all much cleaner than the versions I saw
in those books (which are often browned with age, and covered with
little specks).  When they printed such stories as "Circus Roustabout"
(WDC&S 585), they had the stories made from their negatives.  Sounds
like you used to be sent copies made from their bound proofs.

	This may sound naive, but how did Disney manage to afford "new"
Gottfredson strips in WDC&S 580, 581, 582, 583, and 585 when you
cannot?  I was under the impression you had a bigger budget than
post-cutdown Disney, but maybe I'm wrong... KICK me if I'm wrong!

	A few years ago Germany's Ehapa published "In Search of Jungle
Treasure" as a supplement to their weekly.  This may have been taken
from an Italian product, because I've seen a much larger, but
basically very similarly-formatted, comic from Italy with "Island in
the Sky."  In both cases the strips are printed in their original
format, completely cleaned-up, and reading lengthwise (comic is bound
so it opens with pages rightside up, much wider than they are tall).
The Italian "Island in the Sky" is in black-and-white, while the
German "Jungle Treasure" is in color, but it looked to me like the
German thing was just a reduced-size version of the Italian, which
someone had colored.

	In this case, the Italian version isn't a cut-up version a la
Mondadori's big white books, either;  both of these reprints have not
altered anything in the word balloons -- even the SHAPES of the word
balloons are original.  Maybe the project didn't start in Italy...
but who knows?

	What I'm trying to say is that cleaned-up Gottfredson should
be available to Gladstone with no more work than ordering and putting
together a foreign Duck story.

	* * * * *

	On another front, regarding "Son of the Sun":

	"It may have attained a status sufficient to shield it from 
censorship, especially as Gladstone published it twice already, 
but I dunno..."

	Is status important?  You were just talking about how the very
Taliaferro strip that introduces HDL, their first appearance ANYWHERE
by the one man who created them, is now BANNED -- even WITH changes,
it seems!  I'm thinking about writing Russell Schroeder about this,
and if enough of us *do*, that strip will get un-banned VERY fast.

	(If I do write to Mr. Schroeder, I will NOT imply that anyone
at Gladstone told me the strip was banned -- I'll just bring up the
letter column where Gary Gabner mentioned that the strips that
wouldn't be published were ones Disney had banned, and then say how
from that I deduced... etc., etc., when reading DD 283.  That's how I
*did* deduce it, anyway, long before anyone at Gladstone told me
anything about the situation.)

	Anyone with me on this?  (I'm gonna wait for responses before
I write my letter...)

	That's all for now...

	Yours,

	David Gerstein

	"SO!  Will Patrolio de Balonio de Donald Ducko PAY for his
Christmas dinner, or will he wash dishes in MY kitchen?"
	<David.A.Gerstein at Williams.edu>