Stuff about comics

[Hans Pedersen]

  I have subscribed to this list since digest #11 or so, but
have only read a fraction of the messages, so please bear 
with me if the following is well trodden ground. Since this
is my first posting, let's start with a brief introduction:
I am 27, a Danish citizen, and have been working with  
computer graphics research in the US for the last 2 years
(first at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and 
now at Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). My interest 
in Disney comics is mainly nostalgic: In Denmark, all healthy 
children are chewing Disney comics before they can digest 
solid food, and I grew up surrounded by huge piles of duck 
comics. In elementary school, my class had a "secret" 
closet full of beaten-up comics that we would fill up as fast 
our teachers could confiscate them, and after school we were
playing games like "comic-book sliding": A comic is opened
at the centerfold and placed on the floor; the objective is
then to run across the room and gratuitously slide in the book, 
kicking the centerfold as high in the air as possible while
avoiding serious bodily harm (judged much the same way as figure 
skating, by the way).

  Anyway, the point is that Disney comics bring back a lot
of fond memories to me, much the same way as many Americans 
appreciate Barbie dolls, baseball games, or trips to Disney
theme parks. Also, since I work with destructive beasts like
computers and computer scientists, Disney comics is the perfect
anti-thesis to my work. However, I have no interest whatsoever
in 99% of the synthetic and mass-produced juvenile junk that
has been printed since political correctness destroyed 
Taliaferro's and Barks' ducks and Gottfredson's mice (in 1939, 
1954-55, and around 1942 respectively), but love the early 
and unpolished toons and stories.

Nisse Krenchel wrote:
---------------------

> CB drew some 6,700 pages of comic book artwork between 1946 
> and 1969. But today only around 200 of those pages exist. What 
> happened to the remainder, and which are the surviving 
> originals?

Interesting question. Almost all original Barks art I have seen
has been Uncle Scrooge or WDCS pages from after 1964. The only
exceptions I know of are pages that were rejected by the
publishers around 1952-53 ("Back to the Klondyke(sp?)", "Trick 
or Treat" ...) and the Christmas story from the mid 1940s). 
I would guess that all the rejected pages were returned to
Barks, who then passed some of them on to his friends (at 
least according to Mike Barrier's book on Barks). It would be
fun if any of the lost Barks' stories would someday turn up
in a garage sale :P. Does anyone know whether Western started 
returning the art to Barks around 1965, or another reason why 
art from the last 2-3 years survived? Could this have something 
to do with the change from Dell to Gold Key around that time?

David Gerstein wrote:
---------------------

> [interesting stuff about Pegleg Pete] and
> The very first advertisement (1929) for the then-upcoming
> MM daily strip predetermines its main characters as Mickey,
> Minnie, and Pete ("The Vile Villain").

  I never heard of this ad before and don't understand why it
featured Pete, as he did not appear for the first many weeks?
Btw., Comic Buyer's Guide had an article on supposedly the
first MM drawing ever, which Steve Geppi donated to a museum.
The museum also has the original script to the "Plane Crazy" 
short, which is considered to be the first MM story.
  Btw., my own favorite Pete story is "MM in Death Valley"
which I think was the first story to demonstrate Gottfredson's
genius for the long, wild adventure stories that would define 
his career. I think it can best be compared to Barks' "Frozen 
Gold", as this was _his_ first succesful longer story, and
I have always liked these two stories a lot for sentimental 
reasons.

- Hans

(The ex-Danish now-out-of-the-closet somewhat American duck geek.)