Gottfredson reprints

[Cord Wiljes]

Oh well - my mailreader (Outlook) seems to mess up mails when
I reply to another mail which was not in plain ASCII-text. I suppose
someone at Microsoft built in too much intelligence here ;-)

So here is my latest posting again, this time hopefully without
any attachment and with better linebreaks:


Cord Wiljes wrote:
>> And what I bemoan even more is the lack of a complete reprint
>> of Gottfredson's Mickey strips. The "Mickey Mouse in Color"
>> book is great and the reprints in Gladstone's "Mickey Mouse"
>> series have been much appreciated. But a complete edition in
>> good quality like the Barks library would be a dream come true.

Gary Leach wrote:
> Have to admit, "Mickey Mouse in Color" and the Gladstone Mickey
> comics were incomplete efforts at best, and never meant to be
> (or eventually achieve) definitive collections of Gottfredson.

Mickey Mouse in Color is far from "an incomplete effort". In fact
this book is just about perfect! From all of my 7000+ comics and
2000+ books this one would be amongst the ten I would take with me to
and abandoned island. As it was not meant to be a complete edition
but a "Best of". This is what it is, and as that it couldn't be
any better. A true labor of love and I am dumbfound why to this day the
deluxe edition is still available at original price. True, it is quite
expensive. But then the production value makes it worth every dollar -
and it is signed by Barks & Gottfredson. So if there is anybody reading this
who is still undecisive about buying this book: Do it man - you won't
regret it! Or at least try to get the regular edition.
The Mickey Mouse comic issues were a great read, even though I would have
preferred to see the strips in their original format. For the issues
the panels were rearranged to fit a standard comic book page.

> There was always the hope of doing something of that sort, but, as
> with our abandoned Taliaferro collection, too many obstacles lay
> in the path of doing it right.

That is cruel, you know? Telling me of an abandoned Taliaferro edition.
But I fear it would not have sold enough. A similar project here in Germany
a few years ago was put on ice after three issues. Just a few days ago
I ordered a huge edition with Al Taliaferro sundays from Italy - even
though my only knowledge of the Italian language comes from 7 years of
Latin in school ;-)

> The obstacles to doing the original Carl Barks Library "right" might
> have dissuaded us from attempting it, too, except that it was the
> learning experience that taught us the realities of doing such things.
> As it was perceived (rightly or wrongly, though comics sales strongly
> indicated rightly) that the audience for Gottfredson wasn't as
> sizeable it was for Barks, and as we knew we would get far more
> interference from Disney and have to put in a great deal more production
> effort on the material, the numbers and the expectations just didn't
> come out in favor of a Floyd Gottfredson Library.

I don't have the slightest doubt that it was perceived rightly that a Gottfredson
Library would have become a financial disaster. And as I understand it many of
the old strips (Mickey trying to commit suicide, racial stereotypes, ...)
were banned by Disney in later years and couldn't be reprinted anyway.

> Let's hope that one day that picture will change, and it will happen.
> Dreams are good.

I put great faith in the future of digital media. I hope to see all the great
strips of the past in digital form to be read on an eBook display. With the
old Mickey Mouse strips I believe their copyright has expired so they are public
domain now and everybody could digitize them. But after the trouble Eternity
had with their "Uncensored Mouse" I won't be the one to try :-#

Cord