Pete, and other things

[9475609@arran.sms.edinburgh.ac.uk]

      Hi, folks.

      DON ROSA is probably still recuperating from a deluge of private 
mail I have sent him recently, but I thought I'd throw one more thing 
into the ring:  he referred to "teenage fanboy Duck-haters" as HERO's 
readership.  One thing I've learned is that fanboy <>= Duck-hater.  What 
it more often means is Duck-IGNORER -- people don't KNOW that the comics 
are out there.  I've attracted new readers myself by showing them my 
favorite stories such as "Return to Xanadu," "Lost in the Andes," 
"Monarch of Medioka," etc.  Many of those readers were superhero fans 
who had simply never heard anything ABOUT Disney comics.  There are a 
lot of people who don't even know these comics exist.  One girl who grew 
up in Germany, loving Disney comics, met me in college as a superhero 
fan.  She had never seen an American Disney comic and thought that her 
old-time favorites were a solely European phenomenon.  I fixed that.

      WHILE WE'RE DISCUSSING PEGLEG PETE it's an interesting fact to 
note that Gottfredson never took to the later "Black Pete" name.  All 
the way through 1953 (Pete's last appearance in the MM strip) the 
character is referred to as Pegleg Pete, even when he's wearing his 
artificial second foot rather than leaving his pegleg obvious.  Same is 
true in Italy... to this day.  In fact, "Pietro Gambadilegno" 
(Wooden-leg Pete, I think -- am I right, Fabio?) was shortened to merely 
"Gambadilegno" more recently.
      The very first advertisement (1929) for the then-upcoming MM daily 
strip predetermines its main characters as Mickey, Minnie, and Pete 
("The Vile Villain"), but Pete is actually given a different name:  
Terrible Tom.  When he actually appeared in the strip, the 
animated-cartoon version of his name was (luckily) substituted, and 
stuck of course.
      I think that the best stories with Pete are:  "MM in the Foreign 
Legion," "The Captive Castaways," "The Bar-None Ranch," "Island in the 
Sky," Murry's "Ruby Eye of Homar Guy-Am" (1951) and "Westward Whoa" 
(1953), and Scarpa's "Mystery of Tapiocus VI" and "MM in the Fourth 
Dimension" (that last having not appeared in the States).

      MARK SEMICH:  Any sign of a package full of extremely unexciting 
British Disney comics in your neck of the woods?  Mailed it some time 
back...