Changed panels in Disney comics

[Hans Kiesl]

Yesterday I wrote about the changed (censored?) Bottaro panels of 
I TL 385-A in the German pocket book "Lustige Taschenbücher". I 
wrote "issue # 1", but meant "issue # 7". Sorry for that.

I don't know why I didn't think of the following immediately: Plenty 
of these changes, including the three Perego pages in (non-Italian) 
reprints of I TL 466-B, have already been mentioned (and shown) in 
Boemund von Hunoltstein's book "Ehapa durchleuchtet". He made 
great efforts to list lots of cases of changed artwork (from minor 
changes like removing dollar signs or guns to cutting complete 
panels or pages). It's a really interesting book!

The only minor flaw in his book might be that he worked under the 
hypothesis that most (if not all) of these changes were done by 
Ehapa, the German Disney comics publisher. Probably this is not 
true; most of the changes seem the have been made by Mondadori 
or Egmont Denmark themselves. But while I always guessed that 
the Perego panels that show up in "Lustige Taschenbücher" from 
time to time have been made for the Italian reprint series "I classici 
di Walt Disney", this seems not always to be true, as I TL 466-B 
shows us.

There is another thing that always made me wonder. For many 
decades, Italian pocket book stories have been reprinted in 
European comic books (I'm thinking of the "Egmont countries"). 
Pocket book story pages normally consist of six approximately 
quadratic panels, comic book story pages normally have eight non-
quadratic panels. Therefore the reprints had to use "cut and paste" 
to rearrange the panels. And even more, the quadratic panels had 
to be made non-quadratic. There are two ways of doing this: cut 
the top of the panel to reduce the height or add some artwork at 
the left or the right to increase the width: both of these possibilities 
have actually been realized lots of times.

I'm not familiar with the technicalities of comic book producing, but 
I'm pretty sure that rearranging panels, cutting or adding artwork 
means a lot of work. Why has this been done? Why decided they 
to use Italian pocket book stories in comic books, when there were 
lots of Italian four-tier comic book stories ready to use? Any 
guesses?

-Hans-