Dutch stories and Finnish weeklies

Simo Malinen malines at iobox.fi
Sat Apr 28 11:45:54 CEST 2001


>>Petri:
>> Oh heck, I totally forgot the Dutch stories. Sorry! I like 
>> them. When they started to print them in the weekly, I was just 
>> ecstatic. They brought that something new that I had missed for 
>> so long. The great thing is that they started to publish a 
>> supplement to Aku Ankka (Kuukauden sarjisekstra) that nowadays 
>> contains Dutch stories and occasionally a short Gottfredson
>> story. Most of these stories haven't been published anywhere but 
>> in Holland and Finland (according to Inducks), so we in Finland 
>> are at great position with Dutch stories.
>>
>
> And covers, apparently! Clearly, the Finnish editors are more 
> independent of Egmont than the other Nordic countries. But even 
> the other countries published a lot of Dutch stories in the past
> few years.
>
> --Harry.
>

Yep. 213 covers from Holland have been published in Finland since 
1998  - however some 40 of them have been redrawned covers from 
Egmont and from Western (including 13 redrawn Barks -covers).

That mentioned "supplement to Aku Ankka" (monthly based 32 -pager) 
seems to get it's material directly from Holland: Since May 2000 
all stories in it have been seen in Dutch weekly during last four 
years - not only Dutch stories but all Sunday stories as well too. 
Even so that the Brer Rabbit -sunday story in issue AAX2000-08 is 
the only Brer Rabbit -sunday story published in Dutch weekly in 
last eight years.

Somehow the amount of published Dutch stories in Finnish weekly Aku 
Ankka has "not significantly" increased during last years. Mostly 
the very same stories are seen also in other Egmont countries like 
in Sweden and in Denmark.

This "table" below shows the amounts of pages and the amount of 
stories published in Finnish weekly 1990/1 - 2000/52 by their main 
producing sources:

------ D Denmark - H Holland - W Western
1990: 1324 (172) - 16 (3) - 137 (11) 
1991: 1353 (168) - 40 (4) - 167 (19) 
1992: 1388 (178) - 52 (7) - 102 (13) 
1993: 1380 (170) - 73 (14) - 95 (15) 
1994: 1263 (171) - 122 (18) - 177 (17) 
1995: 1335 (156) - 90 (12) - 160 (17) 
1996: 1384 (148) - 27 (6) - 145 (13) 
1997: 1444 (177) - 54 (10) - 154 (18) 
1998: 1417 (184) - 40 (4) - 139 (30) 
1999: 1435 (165) - 128 (24) - 50 (6) 
2000: 1230 (147) - 204 (30) - 111 (10) 

1st column is indicating the year,
2nd column is indicating pages and (stories) from Denmark (EGMONT)
3rd column -"- from Holland (OBERON, Disney Holland)
4th column -"- from USA (Western)
For example:
In 1990 the Finnish weekly published (the 1st row):
- 1324 pages in 172 stories from EGMONT (D Denmark),
- 16 pages in 3 stories from OBERON (H Holland),
- 137 pages in 11 stories from Western (USA)


The total number of published pages in Finnish weekly is nowadays 
some 1670-1700 pages (comics) in a year (total 36-52 pages per issue 
having 28-46 pages of comics). As seen above the amount of pages 
from Holland is alternating mostly from 50 to 200 per year. That is 
hardly no more than 15% of all pages.

It's also likely that Dutch stories are not going to increase their 
share much higher than what it is currently in a near future. By 
using the INDUCKS -files of H -coded stories it is possible to count 
that in the 1990's Oberon/Disney Holland has produced only some 
450-700 pages of new Disney comics per year. In last year even the 
Dutch weekly "Donald Duck" published more pages from Egmont than 
Dutch pages!
..


For some reason Dutch stories are not my favorites. I consider 
some of them being too aggressively violent - but most I dislike 
the artwork of Dutch artists generally: Looks like artists/inkers 
are always using too big inkbrush and a too tiny paper. 

Let's just add here too that I'm a fan of Vicar/Branca/Murry/Tello/-
Bancells/Santanach -stories...

 - Simo



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