The new Moby Duck

[Francesco Spreafico]

I've just received my copy of Topolino #2380, and it features the return of
Moby Duck, a character that I hadn't seen in many, many years.

It's not the *same* character, he has no Porpy nor any Dim-Witty, and he
doesn't live in Duckburg. Nor he lives in the present, actually this is the
first of a bunch of stories titled "Stories from the Bay", and are set in a
somewhat "Monkey Island-ish" universe.
The result is really wonderful, IMHO, and you all know how little I usually
like new Italian trends ;-)

I won't spoil anything, I'll just add that Moby Duck's helper is Fethry and
that no other usual character seems to be around in this universe. The art
for this first story is by a very inspired Silvio Camboni (Check his site
here: http://web.tiscali.it/silviocamboni unfortunately only in Italian and,
sigh, Flash) and is written by Alberto Savini.

Now let me add another thing... a couple of days ago I had the chance to
pass by the editorial office of Topolino and I happened to see (among other
wonderful things ;-) what I suppose was a print-proof, or something like
that, of a story by Sandro Del Conte printed on a very high-quality paper,
but *not glossy* at all. Well, the story looked beautiful. I generally say
that I like black and white better than color, and it's still true, but this
one was colored... so what was it? A better story? I guess not, I don't
particularly like Del Conte (too Scarpian, not being Scarpa!) I guess it was
the paper. Everybody who's seen a Topolino issue in the last 10 years will
know what paper it has (Greek Miky Maous is even glossier)... a really *bad*
paper. Every story is worsen by this kind of publication.. I wonder what
they have in their minds. I'm sure that most of the young Italian artist
would get much more consideration than they have if their stories received a
better treatment. Probably not all of them, not the youngest maybe, but all
the "middle young" generation gets underestimated like this.

In the '80's they had started using glossy paper, on issue 1516, but later
stopped with issue 1546... I guess that's one of the reasons the third
installment of the Ice Sword trilogy is the "worst", because it was on 1517!

If only they realized this... then we'd just have to moan about the scripts,
but that's another matter :-)

--
Sprea
http://digilander.iol.it/sgrizzo