Gemstone Disneys

Elaine Ramshaw elaine1 at snet.net
Mon Mar 30 02:27:47 CEST 2009


It's time for grief and gratitude. Let me echo Olivier's comments in
expressing my deep appreciation to the Gemstone publishers and all the
Gemstone staff for a terrific run of excellent comics. Thank you for
enabling us to see all of Don Rosa's stories in the language in which he
wrote them. (It was so frustrating in the post-Gladstone years to know that
there were more Rosa stories we might never get to see! If all you had done
was to print Rosa's stories, it would have been "dayenu".) Thank you for
Marco Rota's Money Ocean, Egyptian Prince's Secret, Night of the Saracen and
Haunted Houses. Thank you for making available some of the best work of
other writers/artists: William and Noel Van Horn, Scarpa, Jippes, Branca,
Ferioli, Gattino, Transgaard, Geradts, Heymans, Korhonen, the McGreals et
al. Thank you for Don Markstein's Bungaloos and John Lustig's Melvin and
Janet Gilbert's Hotel Transylvania. Thank you for introducing Carl Barks to
some lucky young people of my acquaintance. Thank you (as I wrote earlier)
for single-handedly saving my godson's academic life by providing him with
attractive reading matter with a rich vocabulary. Thank you for the
excellent production values that distinguished your output. Thank you for
the "American" coloring, which I prefer to the European; you already know
from my letters that I'm a big fan of Susan's coloring in particular. Thank
you for the wonderful "Treasures" volumes, and for the archival research
(yay, David Gerstein!). Thank you for digging up and publishing obscure
fan-requested stories. Thank you for your top-flight customer relations,
which I experienced from *everyone* from editors to the person who handled
the subscriptions to the office manager (thanks, Heather, for the Halloween
giveaway comics!). As a female, over-fifty duckfan, I thank you for Uncle
Scrooge 379, which reprinted the Barks story I liked most in childhood (The
Phantom of Notre Duck) *and* included two (count 'em, two!) stories with
positively portrayed, strong older female characters: John Lustig's Miss
Quackfaster and the witch Aradia in Paul Halas' Magica story! And thank you
for Uncle Scrooge 383, which printed in prestige form my favorite comic
story ever, Rosa's Guardians of the Lost Library. 

 

I'm in mourning that there will be no Donald Duck "Treasures" volume, no
complete set (in English) of Jippes' redrawn versions of the Barks JW
scripts, no complete set of the Barks/Rosa collection, no "prestige"
reprinting of Rosa's "Fir-Tree Fracas" or "The Duck Who Never Was" (maybe
that would have been in the Donald "Treasures"?). And acute withdrawal has
set in, in the absence of my monthly Duckburg fix. But even so, gratitude
overwhelms the grief. Thanks to one and all for six happy years in Duckburg.
And to those of you who came to Gemstone from Gladstone, thanks for all
those comic-blessed years as well.

 

Elaine

 

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