Disney-comics digest #666.

[DAVID.A.GERSTEIN]

      PER:
      Digest #666 was one of the strangest I'd ever seen, with a 
message from Mike -- which had never appeared in a Digest before -- 
mysteriously "blended" with someone else's subscription request as if 
the other person was "quoting" it in her message.  That other 
person got her E-Mail address at the top of the Digest, but Mike's 
didn't appear.  Huh?
      Folk more superstitious than I might attribute the foul-up to 
the fact that this was Digest #666!  ;-)

      DON:
      Do Gladstone's (yours, Egmont's) many Eisner nominations change 
their plans about having a booth at the San Diego convention?  Also, 
I have no way of getting in touch with the Con men for a month.  
Might you be able to check and see when exactly they have scheduled 
my discussion panel?  I'd like to announce that on the Digest.
      Do you know what else is going to be in COLLECTORY #1?  I bet 
they're going to use that VERY uncanonical Branca story ("No Dime for 
Stardom") that I translated back before I knew about the LO$... the 
one with Magica disguising herself as Glittering Goldie.  It's an 
enjoyable story, but danged if it's canonical.  It IS set in the 
Yukon.  (And it's a 9-pager, which means it isn't ALL that could fill 
up the rest of the comic.)

      DWIGHT:
      Did you ever find out whose version of the 3-page Daan Jippes 
escargot story John is going to use?  I'm just curious (and I'm as 
much interested to see your version as I enjoyed working on my 
own interpretation).  Boy, I hope there aren't any translation boners 
like this again, on my part... you didn't translate a Dutch Big Bad 
Wolf story recently, now, did you, Dwight?  ;-)
      When John Clark does get around to publishing that "which-way" 
story, I hate to mention it but he's not going to be able to use that 
page in which MM and GO announce that "this is the first-ever Choose 
Your Own Adventure comic" (or some such).  In the lengthy time 
Gladstone has sat on the story since you told us about translating 
it, REN AND STIMPY SPECIAL #4 (I think) had such a story, titled 
"Masters of Time and Space".  So in the United States, that Ren and 
Stimpy story (actually quite good) has the honors of being the first. 
Gladstone can't really make the claim unless they point out that the 
Italian story was the first in the entire world, which might seem 
like a flimsy excuse to some readers (but I don't know!) when it's 
appearing as the second in the States.
      And was even the Italian one first?  I don't know when the 
Italian "which-way" story originally appeared, but around 1985 the 
French JOURNAL DE MICKEY included some stories of that type with 
Taran from "The Black Cauldron".  Maybe THOSE were the first in the 
genre.

      MATTIAS:
      I still haven't seen NAFSKuriren (spelling?) in my neck of the 
woods yet.  I hope things have gone okay.
      I'm soon going to make arrangements for my article ("A Portrait 
of the Artist as a Young Mouse"/"A Mouse in Black and White") to 
appear in an American magazine -- probably right when I get back to 
the States.

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

      "Why, we must be the us who were shoutin' and hollerin' for no 
reason whatsoever!"
      "DANGED RIGHT WE GOT A REASON!  That me's useeng a blowtorch 
near the ROCKET TANKS!"
      "AAAAAH!  You'll blow us all to keengdom come!"
      "EEEEEEE!  What he said!  What he said!"
      (Quote from the Ren and Stimpy which-way story)