Disney-comics digest #757.

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Fri Aug 18 14:19:00 CEST 1995


HARRY:
        Yes, SOMETIMES the various European editions do give story credits,
but only for Barks or the Rosa guy. But that's one of my points. If there IS
some legal reason or pressure from Disney NOT to give credits, then I can't
understand how they can still give a few. If Barks or I can get credit for
some (but not many) of our stories, what harm could there be in giving
everyone the credit they deserve.
        They did begin doing this in all Egmont editions in 1991, as I may
have mentioned here before. And they swore to me that no one could force
them to stop giving the credits as they should be given. But someone stopped
them, and they've always seemed too embarrassed to ever tell me exactly what
pressure was brought to bare on them.
        One suspiscion I have is that they may be able to give credits to
people living in America since we can't (if we decided to) force royalties
out of them. It may be a different matter for the writers/artists who live
there where the comics are published. (???)

LUTZ:
        Whatever opinion you may have of your German Disney publishers,
don't lump the weekly comic publisher together with the album publisher.
Those are virtually two entirely separate companies, not even located in the
same city. They are two publishers owned by a common corporation (Egmont).
Surely they hobnob to some extent, but the workforces and editorial staffs
and ideas are completely separate. 

SPEAKING OF different European Disney comics, here's one that I've just come
across. Someone has been sending me copies of KOMIX, the monthly Disney
comic from GREECE published by "Attica General Publishing", ("At-ti-ca!
At-ti-ca!") This title seems to be less than 7 years old, but it may rival
Gladstone or Disney-Italia in producing slick, well-colored quality Disney
comics with a good letters page (not letters from kiddies, but more like
Gladstone) and an editorial staff which goes to great lengths to include
numerous historical texts concerning the Disney comics and characters ...
and with FULL CREDITS for every story, presented prominently! Plus they sell
all back issues! It's true that they seem to be lifting various texts and
covers from other publishers, but that's all part of having a Disney license
-- you have rights to anything that has ever appeared in any other Disney
comic book anywhere -- and the editors are very diligent and descriminating
and selective in what they choose to "swipe". I see lots of Geof Blum texts
and even some texts that I seem to have written, even with my signature
reproduced at the end! And this isn't easy for me to figure out -- it's one
thing to read other European languages that use the same characters and use
words that are similar at times to English or use the same latin derivation.
But you've heard the expression "It's all Greek to me" and I see where this
comes from. I kid about European comics being filled with "gibberish", but I
can't even recognize Greek enough to say it's gibberish. It looks like
secret code symbols. It took a while, but I can finally recognize "Carl
Barks" and "Don Rosa" in Greek. ("Don Rosa" comes out looking like "Ntov
Pooa"!) Anyway, these are really nice looking comics, printed in what we
call in America the "graphic novel" style, with heavy covers and square
binding and excellent coloring. I'm currently trying to establish contact
with Attica General to praise them.>




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