Barks's "new" Daisy (DCML digest, Vol 1 #566)

[Daniel van Eijmeren]

HALSTEN AASTEBOL to MARCO BARLOTTI, 12-06-2001:

>> The story W WDC 308-06 "The Beauty Business" ends with Donald 
>> "creating" whith his beauty business a new Daisy. As a sort of 
>> continuity, Daisy keeps the same look in the last stories written 
>> and drawn by Barks in which she appears:
>> W WDC 312-01 "The Not-so-ancient Mariner" and W US 68-02 "Hall of 
>> the Mermaid Queen". Maybe Barks wanted to leave us with a "modern" 
>> Daisy, who knows?

> I've read somewhere that the editors wanted Barks to modernize Daisy 
> and include her as title character in order to appeal to girls of the 
> late 1960s. This was one of the efforts to try stop the drop in sales 
> figures, thinking that if they could get just as many girls as boys 
> to buy Disney comics they would sell a lot more. Of course it was a 
> fiasco. Even more boys stopped buying them, and no girls started. At 
> least this is what I think about this particular question. It would 
> take a lot more than a simple (and silly) shift like this to reverse 
> the general trend of dropping sales figures for American Disney comics 
> in the sixties.

Halsten, your information sounds very interesting.

Do you (or others) remember the exact origin of this information?
And do you (or others) know more information about this subject?

--- Daniël