Komix and Kwality

[Ole Reichstein Nielsen]

Don Rosa summed up very well what makes a good comic book.
Much better than I did in the same digest, and surely paper
quality is of very little importance - something the first
run of Gladstones show in spades. 

One word I would have used in my critic, if English had
been my first language, and I could remember all the words
when I need them, is 'periodical'.

My major gripe with the reprint policy of the quality comic
books is that they publish stories already available in so
many editions, many of which are readily available; not only
on the re-sale market, but also in regular book format or
album series, that you can buy in any well-assorted book or
comic shop. Excluding Finland in the afternoon. :-)

But these stories became known and popular only because they
were first published in a periodical - here today gone next
month again, replaced by a new batch of stories to love or
forget. That is imo the purpose of a periodical: to entertain
the audience with a variety of new stories; some of which will
in time become classics and others not. 

Carl Barks himself had a letter in a Gladstone comic book,
where he although flattered by the interest in his stories
also expressed concern on behalf of the new talents, who he
thought should be given a chance to show their worth, like
he had when the comic books were running out of newspaper
strips to reprint. How else are we going to know if they
are any good? Suppose Gladstone had just kept up with their
reprinting of Barks and other time honored classics, and
never given Don Rosa a shot with his "Son of the Sun"?
(A moment here to stop and shudder at the thought.)

As long as a market has room for both a testing ground and
a hall of fame in their publication line, all is well. It
is very much so in Greece and Italy with a couple of dozen
different periodical titles. But in other countries with
small readership, like Denmark and the US, the total sum
of published pages per year is much smaller. How sad it
would be if they all got spent on stories that could be
found in the back-issue catalogs.


So, to turn this long but interesting debate about quality
over to it's opposite: quantity. How many pages of Disney
comics have been published in YOUR country in 1999?
And how many of them hadn't already seen print there?

Stats for Denmark:

stories (excluding covers, illustrations, etc.): 
new: 651, old: 239 (total:890)

Total number of pages (strips = a quarter of a page):
new: 8234,75, old: 3514 (total:11.748,75)

I didn't even check all the dailies and Sunday strips, and
two 'new' long stories are actually only in new lay-out. So
it's really more than one third of the published pages that 
are reprints.

Consider also that in 1997 Egmont produced 6042 pages worth
of new stories and Topolino (only one of several Italian books)
had 6105 new story pages in 1998. There's a lot more from Italy,
and then there's Holland...

Unless you happen to think that all these new stories aren't
worth a damn anyway, it gives an odd perspective to the way
Gladstone has been administering those 1536 pages a year
in the two monthly books. Without bothering to calculate it,
I'd guess only one third was new stories - mostly by the two
original Gladstone-discoveries, Don Rosa and William Van Horn.

All those figures, and what does it tell anyway?
I think it means that we are missing a lot of good stories,
by choosing to ask for what we already know and like. By
asking for re-runs of every single story Barks ever did,
over and over, we're barring ourselves from new experiences.

Someone recently said to me that Barks did maybe fifty really
fantastic stories, but the rest aren't so much better than
many others. So ask yourselves if someone, whose name you
don't even know yet, may have done one great story, and if
it may be better than Barks' 'worst'. And ask if it makes
a difference in which one you'd like to read in the next
WDC&S.

-Ole