Info for us and Gladstone from Fabio

[David A Gerstein]

	Dear Folks (and particularly John),

	Fabio sent me this and, I believe, forgot to put the
disney-comics mailing list's address on it too, although it's
obviously meant for everybody.  Hence:

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To: David A Gerstein <David.A.Gerstein at williams.edu>
From: gadducci at di.unipi.it (Fabio Gadducci)
Subject: Re: Disney-comics digest #212.

Just some thoughts on old questions...



David wrote

>
>        I-1948, MM as Court Troubador
>        =============================
>
>        I've forgotten who mentioned this story and where it appeared,
>but it was described as being a MM story where Mickey went to the
>studio -- as he does in "The Brave Little Tailor" and "The Robinson
>Crusoe Adventure" -- to make a film, and made one about being in
>medieval times.  In the story, he was shown with pie-eyes, so this
>would seem to be based on the 1933 cartoon "Ye Olden Days".  I'd like
>to know more about this and how I might obtain it.
>

And Ole added

>
>I had to buy a digest, which featured a story (I 1948) in
>which Clarabelle read a fairy tale to Morty and Ferdie: "Mickey Mouse
>and the Troubadour of Camelot." The story is colored in red-scale and
>has the old pie-eyed Mickey and Minnie appearing in a medieval setting.
>This ties in with the recent character/actor discussion, and I think
>Italian scripters are the most faithful to Floyd Gottfredson, whose
>introduction to the Abbeville book BTW kicks off with the words:
>"Mickey Mouse is an actor."
>

I cannot find out where my copy of that issue is. Anyway, it seems one of
the stories with a particular kind of color that Asteriti and Carpi have
been producing for a while (almost all of them in a medieval setting) but
where the main character is usually Donald: I cannot remember more than a
couple of stories with (pie-eyed) Mickey.
(Btw, the use of a medieval setting where the ducks play has been quite a
common device here in Italy,  expecially during the Fifties with Martina
and Bottaro)


Still David, on Gottfredson

>
>        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."
>
[...]
>
>        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.)
>
[...]
>
>        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.
>

Well, actually I think that the project started in Italy...

During its last years as a Disney's publisher, and with the help of Ernesto
Traverso, Mondadori published ALL Gottfredson strips in chronological order
and with the original format, in nice horizontal books.
They published the years 1928-1943 in smaller, four colour  books (approx.
one for each story) and the years 1943-1956 in 14 b&w books, each
collecting a whole year of strips.
All of these were collector's editions, but a few of the more famous
stories of the Thirties were reprinted (in colour) also in a newstand
edition, and between them "In Search of Jungle Treasure" and "Island in the
Sky", to which David is referring.
Now, the small publisher Comic Art is taking care of the project, and has
already reprinted the years 1957-1980.

Same thing for the sundays: I do not remeber how much of them Mondadori
reprinted, but I'm sure Comic Art has already issued the years 1957-1968.

Maybe Gladstone should ask Mondadori, if they have not yet given all their
stuff to Disney Italy (whose archives are an incredible mess, and searching
down for Gottfredson's strips could be a difficult task...)

Bye for now,

Fabio

  

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Fabio Gadducci            Dip. di Informatica
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