In another attempt to get some life into this blog, I think I'll start with something random! I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before on here, but one of my collecting goals is to have a Disney comic from every country where one is published. And not long ago I finally got to check Vietnam off the list.
Inside and featured on the cover is A Matter of Some Gravity, one of my favorite Don Rosa stories. Published in January 1997 soon after the story was created, no official cover for this series existed – and I guess they had to make one themselves. But looking at the inducks gallery, it looks like they did the same for the rest of the comics in this series too.
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| From inducks.org |
So how did they make the cover? Well, it's just art taken from a panel on page 8 of the story, with some background editing.
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| Panels from page 8 of the story, the first one is used as a cover |
Not the best editing work I've seen and they should have time traveled to 2014 to get the cover Don Rosa made for this story instead.
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| Comics from from Fantagraphics, given away on Free Comic Book Day 2014 , promoting the Don Rosa Library |
If you look closely, you can see that the two variants of the FCBD comic above actually have the same artwork! It's just rotated.
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Another fun thing with the Vietnamese comic is that it's bi-lingual in both Vietnamese and English. And the way they did it is by numbering all the dialogue and adding the English text at the bottom of the page.
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| Englsh text printed at the bottom of the pages |
I expected the English text to be simplified, but it looks like they used the original dialogue here.
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| Dialogue in Vietnamese |
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| English text from the bottom of the page in the Vietnamese comic |
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| Original American dialogue |
But why...
Also, if you look closely at the two versions of the first panel above, it looks like they used the Egmont edit in Vietnam, where that panel was slightly cut to make space for editorial text at the bottom of the page. But that wasn't really necessary in this print.
