New European "English Edition" comics

German and Norwegian edition of "English Edition" #1/2016

A new series of Disney comics with the undertitle English Edition just started. So far a couple of issues have been published in Germany and the first Norwegian issue will be in sale on Monday (Feb. 29). But other countries might follow ( ..just speculation from my side). In Norway 6 issues are scheduled for 2016.

Pocket books in English have been published in both Germany, Norway and a couple of other European countries for a few years. They mainly contained Egmont 3-tier stories, with a few Italian ones inbetween. The new series however is in regular comic book size and have 4-tier stories.

The new series compared to the old pocket book series

The first Norwegian issue had two Carl Barks stories and three "D-coded" Egmont stories previously not published in English. As the comics are targeted at people not having English as their first language, the dialogue might have been simplified a bit. Comparing the dialogue in the Barks stories, we can see that slang have been changed to more proper "school English"
 

But other than that, not much seems to have been changed.

The comics also have selected glossary at the bottom of the pages.

Here’s the splash panel for "No Trouble At All" by Noel Van Horn, printed for the first time in English (I think):

Unknown British print of "Christmas on Bear Mountain"

Nothing is more irritating than to buy a second hand comic only to discover that some of the content is missing. Usually this is soon forgotten, but one case has been bugging me for years!

As part of a lot, I got this British Mickey Mouse comic published by World Distributors.

World Distributors #13

The front cover was taped on and the back cover was missing. And to compensate for the missing back cover two random page leaves from another comic was taped on (!)

Extra pages taped on at the end

I already got another copy of this comic, so at first it didn’t bother me that much. But curious as I always am, I tried to figure out where the extra pages came from, and that’s where the mystery started.

The stories are easy enough to identify. The Mickey one is The World Under the Sea from Dell Four Color/One Shots #194, and the one with the ducks is the Barks classic Christmas on Bear Mountain. The page numbers are 59, 60, 63, 64 and judging from what pages of the stories they are, both stories seems to be from the same comic; printed after each other. I tried to do a search in the I.N.D.U.C.K.S. database, but no comics are known to have both these stories printed. At least not in English.

While trying to solve the crime done to this comic, I noticed the word "jolly". That got me thinking "did Barks really write that?"  Comparing to the original he sure didn’t, and the dialogue is clearly changed to be more British.
 

British dialogue compared to the original

So, like the issue the pages are taped on to, the extra pages are probably from a British publication too and not from an American import. The dialogue change got me even more curious. Now it’s not enough to just know where the mysterious pages came from, I really want to read the British dialogued version of the story too!

I suspect it’s printed the late 50’s or in the 60’s. The fact that the comic has more than 64 pages got me to think about Giant Super Mag, another British series from this period.
 

Giant Super Mag

But based on size and paper type I think I have to rule out any unknown issues in that series. If anyone got an idea about what comic the orphan pages are from, please let me know!

***

Update Feb 25, 2016: The mystery is solved, check the comments! Apparently the pages are from a British book called The Walt Disney Treasure Book, published by Odhams Press.

The lettering in this book was partly used to restore "Christmas on Bear Mountain" for Fantagraphics’ Carl Barks collection, resulting in one British word being included by accident.
 

The original Dell Four Color print to the left, Fantagraphics' restoration to the right

"Fun Books" from Joe Books

So far Joe Books have published 3 paperback books called "Fun Book". Before getting the books I found little to no information about what they really contained, so this blogpost will be a short summary of the contents for anyone interested. Then you can decide if it’s worth buying. Personally I don’t think I’m going to get more of these.

Frozen

Frozen was the first one out, and I mostly got it out of curiosity when I read that the book contained comics. Of the 240 numbered pages, the content is as follows:

• The comic adaptation of the movie Frozen (48 pages)
• 13 short original comic stories  (32 pages) 
• Game pages (32 pages)
• "Scenes from the Frozen Cinestory Comic" (71 pages)
• "Frozen Fever Cinestory Comic" (32 pages)
  

The movie adaptation is also published in its own comic by Joe Books. The other print is a regular sized comic and on much better paper, so I’d recommend getting that one instead if that’s the only part you are interested in.

Frozen comic adaptation, published by Joe Books

 

The Fun book compared to the regular comic

The part with the original comic stories is what I personally am most interested in. As I already had the comic adaptation, that part was in fact the only part I found interesting! They are all short gag-based stories, but I thought it was fun to see how the movie characters could be used in new stories.

Original Frozen comics

The game pages are just simple puzzle games for kids (but the whole book is probably targeted at kids and not me..)
 

Game pages

The "Scenes from the Frozen Cinestory Comic" part is a waste of paper in my opinion. It’s made up of lots of screen caps from the movie with speech balloons inserted. And we just get selected scenes from the movie in this book. They are all taken from the "Frozen Cinestory" book, also published by Joe Books, that contains the entire movie told this way. I’ve never liked this concept, and printed on cheap non-glossy paper it’s even worse. The movie Frozen also has a lot of dark scenes that are not suited for being printed on paper at all! In a lot of the panels in this book you can barely see what’s going on. It’s better to go watch or re-watch the movie instead of wasting time reading this.

Cinestory in the Fun Book

Frozen - The Cinestory, published by Joe Books

The book end with "Frozen Fever Cinestory Comic" where all the screens are from the Frozen Fever short movie. This part is not included in the "Frozen Cinestory" book pictured above.

Frozen Fever Cinestory

Inside Out

This book is built up pretty much the same way as the Frozen book. We have:
 

• The comic adaptation of the movie Inside Out (48 pages)
• 6 short original comic stories  (16 pages)
• Game pages (10 pages)
• "Scenes from Inside Out Cinestory Comic" (121 pages)
• Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury preview (23 pages)

The Inside Out comic adaptation might be available in English digitally somewhere, but I haven’t seen it printed in English anywhere else.

 

Inside Out comic adaptation

Again, the original stories are the parts I’m most interested in. But we got less pages of that in this book compared to the Frozen one.

Original Inside Out comics

The cinestory scenes are taken from another cinestory book I guess. But I only got the Frozen one so I can’t compare. At the end of the book we get a preview (ad) for the "Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury".
 

Preview for Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury

The preview is parts of (i.e. no complete stories) the Finding Nemo and the Monsters University comic adaptations. And if the this kind of preview works you’ll end up buying this 800 page monster book:
 

Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury

The Good Dinosaur
 

• The comic adaptation of the movie The Good Dinosaur (48 pages)
• Scenes from The Good Dinosaur Cinestory (142 pages)
• First part of the Inside Out Cinestory (30 pages)

So no original comic stories or games in this book. Here are the same scene as seen in the comic adaptation and the cinestory:

 

The Good Dinosaur comic adaptation

The Good Dinosaur cinestory

February themed covers from IDW

Themed covers, February 2016

Ever since IDW started publishing the monthly Disney titles, they have all been printed with a themed cover variant. Each month have its own theme from one of the Disney parks. Last year the themed covers were the retailer incentive variants, while this year they are the subscription variants.

The February themed covers features the California Screamin' roller coaster at Disney California Adventure. And they are all made by different artists:

Donald Duck Art: Patrick Block Colors: Ronda Pattison	Mickey Mouse Art: Alessandro Perina Colors: Mario Perotta
Uncle Scrooge Art: Massimo Fecchi Colors: Rikki Simons	Walt Disney’s Comics Art: Silvio Camboni Colors: Mario Perrotta

First I have to say I’m glad Pat Block is back in business! Some of his earlier works are among my favorites. He and his wife Shelly did a cover for BOOM! too, but before that I don’t think we have seen any official Disney work since "The Case of the Missing Mummy". I hope we get to see some new stories by him and Shelly too!

But if I try to range this months covers I’m afraid the Pat Block one is my least favorite. Especially Daisy looks weird I think, and the roller coaster car looks nothing like the real one. But a fun detail is that I think Pat has drawn himself and Shelly in the background. At least the couple to the right looks a lot like them!

Judging by the artwork the Mickey Mouse cover is my personal favorite, while gag-wise I like the Uncle Scrooge one best.

I’ve never visited this Disney park myself, so I did some image searching on the internet to compare to the covers. I wonder if any of the artists actually have been there, or if they did the same to do research. As I said, the roller coaster on the Donald Duck cover is far off model, and the three other covers also show us how the roller coaster used to look like, not how it looks today.

I found these two images showing the old look compared to the current one.

I also noticed that the coloring of the cars was different, but it looks like the paint job actually has changed over the years.

Bad Day at Black Water

In sale right now is Donald Duck #377 (IDW’s #10) with the story "Bad Day at Black Water".

 

With script by Carol and Pat McGreal and art by Giorgio Cavazzano the story takes us on a journey to the least tourist friendly town on the planet! They’ve been so isolated that the kids in town have never seen a stranger before. And how did the ducks decide to spend the vacation there? By fate of course…

We know from other stories that Duckburg has a port, so I assume this is a map over part of Calisota and Duckburg is one of the two red circles in the bottom right corner. Here are two of Carl Barks’ more detailed maps:

From an untitled WDCS #155 story and "Fishy Warden"

Before the real mystery in "Bad Day at Black Water" even started, I got my own mystery going on, one that might turn out to be nothing… At the same day as DD #377 got on sale we also got WDC #728. And the 8th part of the "The Search for the Zodiac Stone" started with this speech balloon:
 

"Flight WDCS-728" is of course a joke referring to the current title and issue number, and I guess "arriving at gate 2-016" is February 2016 or just 2016. Why it’s arriving from Toronto, Canada I don’t know (the comic is printed in Korea, IDW offices is in San Diego and the translator is USA based too I think). Also note that Duckburg and Mouseton apparently share the same airport. Anyway, this hidden reference got me thinking that the "Bad Day at Black Water" started with some reference too.

When Scrooge says his files date back to 1946, I started wondering if that specific year was put in by purpose. My first thought went to Scrooges first appearances in "Christmas on Bear Mountain". According to the bibliography in Michael Barrier’s book "Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book", the creation date for "Christmas on Bear Mountain" is July 22, 1947. This date comes from a list Barks himself compiled, and for this story the date it’s from the voucher Barks received from Western, i.e. the date they accepted his story. So work on the story was done sometime before that, maybe as early as 1946. But we don’t know that for sure, do we? I might of course be overthinking everything and 1946 is just a random date.

If anyone else have the answer or another theory, it would be interesting to know :)

Alright, I’m not going to go into reviewing this story, I don’t think I have that much to say about it really. But I did like it, even if the ending was a little boring after an exciting buildup. It’s worth checking out if you like Duck comics. I have a couple of more things to note about the story though.

I like the fact that IDW make sure clothes and recurring objects are colored the same way in every story. Even when they use the coloring done by other publishers small adjustments are made. This story uses the Disney Italia coloring and one of the things that have been adjusted is the color on Donald’s car. But one little slip-up was made this time. The car is all red in all panels except one, where the Italian red-blue coloring is still used.

If you’ve read the story you might have noticed the story code I-D 2011-014. The I-D (or I/D) codes were stories made by Egmont Creative and Disney Italia in cooperation. Searching in inducks we can see that a number of these stories were made, but this is the first one published in the USA. From the list it looks like they stopped the coproduction in 2012, after just a few years. At least this kind of coding stopped then.

#DuckRock – music inspired by Disney ducks

Next month a Norwegian rock group called StarratS of UfotofU will release the digital album "#DuckRock – a Tribute to Duck Artists anywhere…". As the title suggest, the music is inspired by Disney comics, and several characters like Scrooge, Donald, Gyro and even Moby Duck get their own song! Some of the songs with lyrics can be checked out on their project webpage.

For more information there’s also an interview on the Norwegian comic page Serienett. But it's written in New Norwegian, a variant of Norwegian so google translate have some trouble translating part of it.

Looking at the first promo art, it’s clearly inspired by Don Rosa.

Promo art for #DuckRock

We can see the same polar light and skyline used in several of Rosa’s covers and the opening panel of "Hearts of the Yukon". We can also see Castle McDuck, as we know from Barks' "The Old Castle's Secret" but also from Don Rosa stories like "A Letter from Home".

Opening panels for Don Rosa's "A Letter from Home" and "Hearts of the Yukon"

The same background scenery was also used on Tuomas Holopainen’s album "Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge". I’m not sure if that is just a coincident or if StarratS of UfotofU also is inspired by Holopainen’s album.

Cover for Tuomas Holopainen’s album "Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge"

Then we have the release party poster that is a reference to the first issue of the Norwegian weekly Donald Duck comic.

#DuckRock release poster and the cover of Donald Duck & Co 1/1948

For more "eye candy" (as they call it) check out the page I linked to earlier :)

IDW’s Mickey Mouse logo

It’s time for a random blogpost. A comment on my last post made me pull out Mickey Mouse #292 from the archive (aka. comic collection). Sooo what does MM #292 and MM #310 have in common?
 

Mickey Mouse #292 and Mickey Mouse #310

#310 is the first issue of IDW’s Mickey Mouse run, and also the first time the current Mickey Mouse logo was used on the cover. But it’s not the first time it is used in the comics! Inside #292 the logo is used for the story "The Incredible Black Comet".
 

Inside Mickey Mouse #292

I might be completely wrong about this [just a little, check the comments], but I believe this is the first time it is used as a comic story/comic issue logo. But originally the logo is way older. It’s taken from a 1928 poster, and the logo is (kind of) a compressed version of the opening screen on the very first Mickey cartoons.

January 2016 issues from IDW

January 2016 issues from IDW

I might be a bit late with this post, but my local comic shop hasn’t received this week’s new Disney comics yet. So here are some quick comments on last month’s issues instead.

Uncle Scrooge #10 (414)

I’ve read everything in this issue before, so to me it was a boring start of this year’s IDW comics. But for those who haven’t there’s a lot to enjoy! The main story is an old weird Italian story drawn by Romano Scarpa. I like that IDW bring new life to these oldies, and even if the plot often make no sense or just is a sequence of crazy events they are fun to read. "The Eternal Knot" is also a good example of how Scarpa bring motion and action to every panel, there’s no "wooden" characters just standing there talking in this story!

As usual when I have another copy of a story, I like to do a quick comparison. And it looks like IDW did another silly gunfire censoring in this story. In my Norwegian copy we can see a lot of bullets flying when the hermit fire his blunderbuss. They are removed in the IDW print.

But you can clearly see the hats are filled with bullet holes later.

I wonder if this issue of Uncle Scrooge originally was intended for February but for some reason moved. "The Eternal Knot" is a love story and we also get another Beagle Boys love story later in the comic. And the Crosstalk article even mention Valentine’s Day when t talking about the issue, but Valentine’s Day isn’t until mid-February...

Donald Duck #9 (376)

This was my most anticipated issue in January. I’ve been wanting to read the first Zantaf story for a long time, but it hasn’t been printed in a language I can understand until now.

"Tycoonraker" is also the second "McDuck Intelligence Agency" (MIA) story, so to get the most out of the story I would recommend to also read "Moldfinger or The Spy Who Ducked-Out On Me". It’s printed in Boom!’s first (and only) volume of "Donald Duck Classics". The book was really overpriced in my opinion, but you might be able to find a used one.

I expected more of an origin story of Zantaf, but he is just introduced as another mad scientist without much background information. So I guess I liked the story more as the second MIA story than the first Zantaf story. But now that we got introduced to the character I hope we get to see him again.

Mickey Mouse #8 (317)

"The Chirikawa Necklace" is a real Mickey mystery story, and a favorite of mine. It’s highly recommended! This story also features three (later recurring) characters of Scarpa’s creation. We have the first appearance of both Aunt Melinda and Pete’s girlfriend Trudy in addition to Atomo.

But I think the name Doctor Proctor must be added by the translator. Proctor was a regular character in the Mickey newspaper strips, but not used at the time this story was created I believe.

Proctor in "The Chirikawa Necklace" and in the daily strips

We also got the Super-Goof story "Polar Opposition!" in Mickey Mouse #8. I’ve read this one before too, but now I got to see the first page! That page was cut when the story was printed in Norway, while the original page 2 was reorganized to be the first page.

The Norwegian print comared to page 2 in IDW's print

Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #727

WDC #727 features chapter 7 of "The Search for the Zodiac Stone", with Goofy’s French double. But did you know the cover originally was intended to be even more evil looking than it is? Andrea Freccero posted a sketch for the cover on his blog in October last year. And compared to the final cover we can see the saw was removed.

Sketch and final cover by Andrea Freccero (sketch from Freccero's blog)