The Abbeville Press compilations

Robert Hutchings robertmhutchings at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 11 12:47:45 CET 2009


Does anyone know anything about the Abbeville Press compilations of the late 1970s and early 1980s? There are several titles: "Donald and His Nephews," "Goofy," etc., all of which have about ten well known stories by--but uncredited--Barks and Gottfredson. What I'm wondering about is how the process of selecting the stories and editing worked. Most of the stories are missing a few panels--and it seems the panels that are missing are semi-randomly selected. They're never integral to the plot, but not all of the non-integral panels are deleted. Furthermore, sometimes there are additional panels drawn by someone other than Barks inserted instead of the Barks panels, with completely different dialogue--often borderline nonsensical within the story. There are even a few Barks-drawn panels that appear in Abbeville a few panels before they did in the original Barks version, and they have new dialogue (this is something only someone very familiar with the
 stories would pick up on, though). It's almost as if Abbeville bought the stories by the panel, bought the dialogue separately, and both came "assembly-required" like a jig-saw puzzle rather than in any coherent manner. It's totally baffling. And, this goes way beyond any editing that Western did of Barks' and Gottfredson's stories--I know Western chopped some scenes from their stories, but there is at least some apparent logic to such editing. There's no discernable logic to the Abbeville editing.

Robert Hutchings


      


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