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.
I have the same collecting goal! And I hope you won't mind if I share my experiences with the countries I'm having trouble trying to find issues. In the Americas, Venezuela is not an easy market. But some edition must have found its way to northern Brazil and eventually I will find it on our e-business venues. Africa is a rather difficult target: Morocco, Tunisia and South Africa (in Afrikaans) had editions only in the 50-60s. So, Algeria may be the easiest of them. Europe is a snail's pace work until I find issues from the Baltic countries, the Balkans region (on its broader definition, minus Greece) and Ukraine. The Middle East, well... suffice to say, beyond challenging. The rest of Asia I'm doing my little ant's work, but I think that Mongolia and South Korea (where a local once tried to help me but only found Little Golden Book editions) will be very laborious to find. Kudos on your Vietnam find! From Southeast Asia, I have only some Indonesian editions (let me know if you would want one). And to end the list, New Zealand has shown itself to be an elusive market. I once had five friends vacationing on different parts of the country looking for Disney comics there, online and on spot, to no avail. I would obviously be very grateful for any tips or hints.
ReplyDeleteI used to find random foreign Disney comics on eBay, but postage has become too expensive to justify getting single comics on there. But I'm regularly checking eBay, Catawiki, and other local sales/auction sites and a few local Facebook groups for comics – and once in a while there are some interesting foreign comics being sold. But I guess you have to be patient trying to collect that way. Personally, I've been traveling a lot around in Europe and got comics during the travels. Outside Europe, it's mostly just lucky finds online.
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