Ohio convention; L. von Drake

[Wilmer Rivers]

ALL EUROPEANS:
You really missed out on a treat by Don's not being able to draw
for you the full-color sketches that he drew at the comics show in
Columbus.  I was fortunate enough to get one of those, and it's a
great sketch indeed.  I asked for a picture of Donald getting really
angry, and Don colored it with just the right amount of red in Donald's
face.  It's a shame that the European duck fans who would have so much
enjoyed even seeing one of those sketches be created didn't get the
chance to do so.  Incidentally, a very popular item picked up by the
fans was Don's stack of Scandinavian Disney comics.  He was giving
away copies of those comics (none containing any of his stories, though)
for free.  Since almost nothing else at a convention is free, you
can imagine their appeal, even to non-Disney fans.  So now a bunch of
American comics fans own copies of Anders & Co., Mikke Mus, and Aku
Ankka, even if they don't understand Danish, Norwegian, or Finnish!

As for the doom and gloom in the American comic book market, that's
very real.  Most of the people buying comic books in the last several
years did so for investment purposes, not for reading pleasure, and
now that they're beginning to realize that they won't be able to send
their kids to college on the basis of selling a 5 year-old stack of
Spiderman comics, they've stopped collecting them.  Then this year
the market has really undergone turmoil with Marvel, and then D.C.,
limiting themselves to a single distributor.  The effect of that is
that lots of comic store owners can't get the quantity-purchasing
discounts that they used to, since now they must split their orders
between Marvel's distributor and DC's.  Without that quantity-purchasing
discount, their profit margins shrink, and coupled with the drop in
the number of comics sold (now that the investors have dropped out),
the drop in the profit per comic is enough to force a lot of stores
out of business.  Where will that leave Gladstone?  Well, there will be
fewer stores selling comics, and those that are still left will try
to survive by concentrating on the biggest selling titles, which will
certainly make things difficult for Gladstone.  I suspect that they
will get by mainly on the strength of subscription sales to the CBL
in Color albums, especially now that they're getting to the Scrooge
series.

DAVID:
> He [Ludwig von Drake] was created for the Disney
> TV series "Wonderful World of Color" (now called "The Magical World of
> Disney," as it has been for some years) in, I believe, 1960 or 1961.
> Maybe Jack Hannah created LVD?  He directed many of the
> duck-related episodes of that TV series.  But this is just
> speculation, I don't know for sure.
>
I don't have a clue, either, who was the first person to put LVD into
a Disney cartoon, but I think that in a very real sense you can say
that comedian Sid Caesar "created" him.  LVD is nothing more than a
look-alike, sound-alike, and act-alike animated version of Sid Caesar's
popular "Old Professor" character, which he played on television
throughout the 1950s.  Even the hat is exactly the same.

Wilmer Rivers