Thursday, April 2, 2020

The Adventures of Mika Miš

Cover of The Adventures of Mika Miš (Доживљаји Мике Миша)
Cover


The Adventures of Mika Miš (Доживљаји Мике Миша) is an interesting book if you want to know more about early Disney comic history from around the world, and in this case the old Yugoslavia. The book was published in 2014 by the Serbian publisher 3латно доба (Zlatno Doba) in collaboration with Pančeva cultural center, and was limited to 500 printed copies.

 

Back cover of The Adventures of Mika Miš (Доживљаји Мике Миша)
Back cover

The book starts with texts by Disney historian Didier Ghez and the local authors Saša Rakezić and Zdravko Zupan – talking about Disney comics being published in Yugoslavia in the 30's. The text is printed in both English and Serbian Cyrillic, which is great for us that can't read Serbian! It goes beyond talking about the comics reprinted in this book and is an interesting read on its own.
 

Text in both Serbian and English


The texts also discuss if the Mika Miš character as seen in the comic pages reprinted in this book and drawn by local artists really is Mickey Mouse. Or is it a completely different character inspired by Mickey Mouse?
 

Example page from the text inside the book

After the texts, the rest and the majority of the book is reprinting the The Adventures of Mika Miš; a serial that started in 1932 in the children's magazine Veseli četvrtak.
 

First pages of "The Adventures of Mika Miš"
First pages of "The Adventures of Mika Miš"

The stories follow Mika traveling around the world, and is reprinted with the original text. It would have been interesting to see a translation of the comic pages too, but you can follow the basic story just looking at the pictures. And using my phone camera with the Google Translate app actually worked great for reading the story!

A few more examples from inside the book:



Example page from "The Adventures of Mika Miš"

Example page from "The Adventures of Mika Miš"


8 comments:

  1. I had to do quite a bit of searching online to be able to get hold of this book! But I ended up getting it from an online shop called Stripovi.

    https://www.stripovi.hr/dozivljaji-mike-misa.aspx

    The international postage was more than the actual price for the book. But I had no trouble ordering from this site. The book is limited to 500 copies, but it looks like you can still get it from that Stripovi shop as I'm writing this.

    Another option might be to order directly from the publisher through e-mail, that was my backup plan:

    http://www.zlatnodoba.com/en/katalog/

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    Replies
    1. Hi! It sounds very interesting and the book seems to be really cheap. :-) Out of curiosity, just how much did the international postage cost you? I'd like to buy one, but I must consider that question first, because I don't like surprises...

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    2. I paid 69 HRK for the book and 144 HRK for postage from Croatia to Norway. The total (213 HRK) would be about $35 (USD) or €30 (EUR) with today's exchange rate.

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  2. Hey, do you know is there still a possibility of buying it? I clicked on the link above, but I found nothing...

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    Replies
    1. They must have removed it today, because I clicked the link yesterday when writing the comment above. And the book was still listed with 69 HRK on Stripovi then. But yes, it looks like it's gone from the website now.

      I'm not sure where else to get it. I had to do a bit of searching around to find the book too.

      But kupindo.com is a Serbian online action site, and I found 3 persons selling it there at the moment:
      https://www.kupindo.com/pretraga.php?bSearchBox=1&Pretraga=mike+mi%C5%A1a
      I've never used the site though, and it's not in English.

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    2. It is okay now, I wrote to stripovi and they are going to sell it today probably. Thanks :D

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  3. Hi! Sorry to bother u but lately i’ve been looking for this book, I actually found some of them but I think they’re totally in serbian, is it possible or every version is half servian and half english? Also if u have any advice where to look for them i’d be so glad, thanks!

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    Replies
    1. As far as I know, there’s only one edition of this book. The comic pages are all in Serbian, while the text articles are in both English and Serbian. The book had a very low print run, and they might have done another edition – but I don’t know anything about that.

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