Missing Don Rosa stories in Sweden

[Stefan Diös]

Sigvald:

>I suppose that it's a well known fact, at least
>among the Scandinavians here, that there are
>published more Don Rosa stories in Norway and
>Denmark than in Sweden. The following six stories
>have been published in Norway, but not in Sweden:
>
>AR 106  Cash Flow (*)
>AR 145  His Majesty McDuck
>H 87173 Leaky Luck
>H 89174 The Pied Piper of Duckburg (*)
>D 93574 The Duck who never was
>D 94144 The Lost Charts of Columbus
>-----
>* This story is not published in Denmark either.
>
>Can someone here, like Stefan Diös, tell us about
>the reasons for this, and maybe also what hope
>Swedish Don Rosa fans should have about seeing
>these (forgotten) stories in the future?


Well, since you ask me so nicely...!

Most of these stories came as extra supplements to the regular weekly. Now, 
due to marketing reasons, the Swedish weekly traditionally doesn't use as 
many supplements each year as do Denmark or Norway. That's because we have, 
or had,  a larger pool of subscribers, percentagewise, who already paid for 
the magazine. Our Scandinavian counterparts, on the other hand, had to rely 
on some extra incentives to attract the regular, single-copy buyers on 
which their sales figures depended. Obviously, supplements cost money, so I 
guess it was an easy decision for our business people not to use all the 
suggested supplements, since they weren't needed for profit in the same way 
as in Denmark or Norway. So it wasn't an editorial decision at all.

That's the way it was explained to me some years ago. I'm not in marketing 
and generally don't understand anything about finances or business, but 
this reasoning makes sense to me. A Donaldist might argue that a Don Rosa 
supplement would profit anyway, since so many extra Rosa fans would buy 
that particular issue. This may or may not be true, but at the time when 
this happened, it was unreasonable to expect marketing executives in our 
company to make any qualified decisions based on the contents of the 
magazine. Again, this was decided away and above from the editorial office, 
which probably wasn't aware that there even *was* a supplement that could 
have been made. So I can certainly understand how it happened, even though 
I naturally would have preferred to see those fine Rosa stories in Sweden.

I don't know if the same subscription differences still apply, but I do 
know that Sweden still uses fewer supplements than Denmark and Norway. But 
we have more of them than we used to, and we also have (supposedly) a 
greater awareness of what's in them, even in marketing. So it's possible 
that some of these stories might show up once in a while, maybe in 
supplements like the summer extras or something like that. It's not my 
decision, far from it, but on some occasions my opinion is asked, and I do 
believe we picked up one such "forgotten" story (The Ten Avatars) some time 
ago. Maybe it can happen again. Otherwise, we'll have to wait until the 
stories are reprinted somewhere. When this happens, they're usually offered 
all over Scandinavia (and the rest of Egmontland, I believe), and we may 
decide to run them.

I might add that there's one notable exception to the above: "The Duck Who 
Never Was". That was indeed an editorial decision, and a rare one at that. 
It was taken out simply because people at our editorial office didn't like 
it. That's also fine with me, even though I was a little disappointed at 
the time. It's exactly that kind of decisions the editors are there to 
make, and they are entitled to their opinions and to act accordingly. They 
don't have to agree with me, or other Don Rosa fans, or non-Rosa fans, or 
any other readers. People will always disagree. And again, there might come 
a time for a reprint, and maybe we'll have other editors who decide that 
the story is hunky-dory.

These are my personal views and understandings, and I apologize in case I 
got something wrong. Thanks for listening, or not listening, whatever the 
case may have been.


Stefan Dios
Malmo, Sweden