Disney-comics digest #608.

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

      WES:
      I hope your recent posting was a joke!  Does anyone actually like 
seeing serialized stories presented in BIMONTHLY chapters?  Or stories 
that weren't meant to be serials presented in serial form?
      "Monarch of Medioka" is my favorite Mickey story, and since it WAS 
originally published as a serial, I don't mind seeing it that way.  But 
on a bimonthly schedule which causes it to take a full year to be 
completely published?  >Sigh<  I remember 1990, when I went down to the 
shop and blew two weeks' allowance to buy "Monarch" all in one part, 
then sat down for a King Michael-size orgy of reading pleasure.

      MORE LENTILS!
      Speaking of serials... has anyone picked up USA 33 yet?  I'd like 
to know what people think of the last part of the Lentil story.  Again 
quite wordy, but I think the dialogue, on the whole, FEELS better.  
Among the first few pages of this part were these lines for U$:
      "Did you really think I was going home?  I'm thinking you don't 
know me very well, nephew!"
      "Simple, cretin!  I heard someone in the Beagle Boys' building... 
and if they think we're gone, they'll GO, themselves!"
      "Just as I thought!  Now button your beaks, and shuffle along!"
      Since Disney chopped out any phrases that involved one character 
insulting another in the first two parts of this story, I think these 
three panels will show a very impatient Scrooge saying things to Donald 
that don't sound remotely cross whatsoever.
      I finished "Colossus of the Nile" a few weeks ago, and IMHO it's a 
much better story which I was able to give much more interesting 
dialogue.

      THE BEAGLE BOY DEBATE:
      In the Lentil story, Scarpa looked back to the earlier Barks 
stories in which numbers aside from 1, 7, and 6 were used.  His Beagles 
have numbers which are PALINDROMES:  342-243, and so on.  Any numbers 
could be used.  There was even 313-313!
      When I rewrote the story, I left everything as it was, and 
Gladstone changed all the numbers to 176 variants themselves.  I think 
they did the right thing.
      There's an Egmont Magica story, "A Witch in Crime" (one of my 
FAVORITE Egmont stories, BTW) in which Magica briefly transforms herself 
into a Beagle Boy.  She gets the number 176-276, and the BBs eventually 
figure out something's awfully amiss.

      WILMER:
># 4: (variant of #3) a whole civilization of tiny pirates [have]
>     learned modern drilling and hydrology technology (from raiding
>     parties' stealing books from libraries)
      ...This begins to sound like the Vicar story "The Little Gronins" 
that was in USA 24. In fact, VERY much like it.  The idea of an 
underground civilization having tremendous technical capability has been 
done, even if the pirate angle is completely original.
      Back in 1990 I did a story (with my own characters) called "The 
Underground Kingdom" which was a lost-civilization story a la Barks.  I 
hadn't yet read Egmont stories like "The Secret of the Shogun's Stone" 
(US 270), "Return to Bear Mountain" (DDAD 33), and "The Little Gronins" 
(USA 24) which sort of retroactively "copied" my idea (although they 
were actually created before it!).  I'm going to rework my own story for 
Egmont, too, but I'm worried it will seem like a cliche now... Maybe 
I'll make it into a MICKEY story, which will differentiate it 
substantially.

      David Gerstein
      <9475609 at arran.sms.ed.ac.uk>