Donald Quest, now as a game

Donald Quest from IDW

Back in 2016/2017 a mini-series titled Donald Quest was published by IDW in the USA. The series had the story Hammer of Magic! printed in five parts over five issues, and was later collected in a trade paperback.

After that we haven't seen any more American comics from the world of Feudarnia, but in Europe three more serials have been published. According to the inducks database, the English titles are:

The Rock of Fire
The Song of the Siren
The Legacy of Iron

Pages from "The Rock of Fire"

Pages from "The Song of the Siren"

They pick up after Hammer of Magic! and we get to see more places in the universe of Feudarnia with new villains and new heroes.

 

New characters in "The Rock of Fire"

One of the things I wondered about when reading the first serial was the character and beast presentations put inside the story. For the Meteorbests we got information about power, weakness and an energy number.

 

From the comic book story

For other characters some basic facts.

 

From the comic book story

And some of the Beastbusters were presented as in-story trading cards.

 

I thought this sounded like some kind of role-playing guide, and wondered if they had a larger plan for the series. And now in February 2020 a board/card game based on the series was released in Italy.
 

Online ad for the game

The game got bundled in two parts with Topolino #3351 and #3352, and you have to get both to get the game complete. I got curious about the whole thing and wanted to check out this for myself.

Topolino #3351 with the first part of the game bundled

Topolino #3352 with the second part of the game bundled

The entire game package consists of a game board, 110 cards, 2 pages of game rules and a box to keep everything in. What would have been nice to have in addition is a deck box to keep the cards in.

 

All parts of the game

The cards are divided in:

1 Meteormaster (The Phantom Blot) (purple border): catch it to win the game
13 Meteorbeast cards (purple border): must be deactivated and caught before getting to the Meteormaster
7 Beastbuster cards (yellow border): used to catch Meteorbeasts
18 weapons (red border)
21 traps (blue border)
50 action cards (green border): does abilities and effects

I recognize some of the artwork from the stories, while other cards look like have artwork made for the cards.

The game is turn based where you draw cards, buy cards on a market and play your action and equipment cards etc. I think I understand the basic rules of the game but won't try to explain more here... I probably misunderstood some parts of the instructions (with my limited Italian knowledge and computer translation of the rules), and I haven't tried to play the game with anyone else yet. 

Game setup from the instructions

Reading online reviews, others say the gameplay is broken and doesn't work well. But I can't confirm that on my own. I wish an English version of the game was released too; it would have been fun to try out without the language hassle. It's not every day we get a board or card game with Donald and Mickey!

"The Klondike Journals" and "A Christmas Crossing" (stories from Scrooge's youth)

Norwegian cover for "The Klondike Journals"

At the end of last year, we got a few new stories from Scrooge's youth. And we got to see several new relatives to other Duckburg characters. I've seen some interest and discussions about The Klondike Journals by Kari Korhonen online, and figured I'd show what relatives we got to see in the stories. Note: This is going to have spoilers for the series, but it's been a few moths since the European printings now, and I don't see this being published in the USA anytime soon.

The five parts of "The Klondike Journals"

The fist batch of The Klondike Journals have five different stories/parts, but with some continuity tying them together. The first part is 10 pages and the other parts 7 pages each. According to some online sources more parts are planned for 2020. The stories mostly take place in Scrooge's Yukon days while he is traveling around.
 

Uncle Scrooge traveling around

I enjoyed reading the stories, but think they could have worked better if they were longer. It's not much of a buildup and too much jumping around places, I think. Also, I personally think it was a bit silly having everyone being relatives of someone already known. A few new relatives are ok, but this felt more like forced fan service. And some of the them didn't need to be relatives for the story to work (especially the fathers of O'Hara, Casey and the mayor). The stories also have tons of references to other stories by Barks and Rosa. I normally like having references to older stories, but this case it went a bit overboard. And when you have footnotes every second page telling you to check out some other story it takes you out of the reading. This could have been nice things for fans to discover on their own. Overall, I thought this series was okay, but just that.

Here are some of the new characters we meet in the series.

Brunhilde Typefast (Brunhilde Quackfaster)

Clearly a relative of Miss Quackfaster, but it doesn't say if she's her mother.
 

Gadget Gearloose

Brother of Ratchet Gearloose and Gyro's granduncle.

 

Fathers of Azure Blue and Sharky

 

Canadian Mounties

Scrooge meet up with tree guys that would be the beginning if the Mounties. Also they are the fathers of O'Hara, Casey and Duckburg's pig mayor.

Father of Clerkly
 

Bhaltair McDuck

Scrooge's uncle and brother of Fergus McDuck

 

**********************

Another recent story from Scrooge's past is A Christmas Crossing (Egmont's internal English title), printed in a Norwegian Christmas comic. And so far, it's not printed anywhere else I think. But I hope it will, because this is an amazing adventure that needs to be shared!

 

The story takes us from Whitehorse, Yukon to New York on an action filled journey with Scrooge and Goldie.
 

Lots of action in this story!

The entire story could be seen as an extension to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as the story follow up on events seen there and mostly takes place between two panels in The Billionaire of Dismal Downs.
 

The story in "A Christmas Crossing" takes place beween these two panels

And in the new story we see the clerks from Rosa's story asking for a stove, and Scrooge sending the letter home.
 

Clerks asking for a stove, and Scrooge sending a letter home

The writing team actually pitched the idea for Don Rosa before continuing to develop the story, and got his "blessing" to do it. According to interviews with the creators he was glad for someone to follow up on his stories.

We have a few interesting side characters in this story too. First, the driver is a caricature of Don Rosa.
 

We also have a background character looking a lot like Carl Barks

 

And we meet Miss Quackfaster as a kid.
 

Miss Quackfaster as a kid

In this story the young Quackfaster say she is going to visit her aunt in Skagway. This suggest that Brunhilde in The Klondike Journals actually is Quackfaster's aunt! But I'm not sure if this is a coincidence or something planned. Both stories were created for Egmont around the same time.

 

Quackfaster tells Goldie she is going to visit her aunt in Skagway

***

You can see more great artwork and the drawing Arild Midthun made for Don Rosa on Arild's webpage.

Screenshot from Arild's webpage

Fun reading in old newspapers

Once in a while I like to search old newspaper archives for things related to Disney comics. Two of my recent discoveries are not really that interesting, but still fun to read.

In The Roanoke Rapids Herald, August 05, 1948 we can read about a study into children's comic reading. According to their findings, kids that read Disney comics apparently have a higher IQ than the ones that prefer superheroes...
 

From The Roanoke Rapids Herald, August 05, 1948

In The Sunday Star (Evening Star, Washington DC), March 2, 1941, there is a long text about “the cop who saved a thousand kids”. 

From The Sunday Star, March 2, 1941

To teach kids about safety, he used comic characters in his own lantern slides.

 

From The Sunday Star, March 2, 1941

These are not official Mickey drawings, but a fun example showing how the character was used by others in the early days. Note the size of Mickey compared to the humans (!)

From The Sunday Star, March 2, 1941

365 Days with Winnie the Pooh

At end of last year Dark Horse published a nice little hardcover book collecting daily strips and Sunday pages with Winnie the Pooh. I was a little bit reluctant to get the book at first, partly because I saw online samples and the art looked really pixelated there. And I noticed some other things I didn't like, which I'll discuss below. But getting the book in hand it looks a lot better on print, and the majority of the content I've never seen on print before.

As someone with a special interest in Disney comics there are things I wish was different with a collection like this, but for a casual or "normal" buyer I think this is a great book that I can recommend.

Daily strips inside the book

Sunday pages inside the book

My main disappointment with the book is the selection of the comic strips. This is far from a complete collection and I'd rather see a complete chronological collection of all the strips in a series of books. But even for a selection, I wish they at least would include some strips with the most interesting part of the entire series. And by that I'm talking about Sir Brian and his dragon!
 

Daily strip June 21, 1978 - first strip with Sir Brian's dragon

This book does not contain a single strip with Sir Brian and the dragon, and they were such a huge part of series from the very beginning to the end! The characters of Sir Brian and the dragon were actually created by Don Ferguson and Richard Moore specifically for the newspaper comics, and an article about this would also have been great.

 

Sir Brian in a 1986 Sunday page

I can't stop thinking that a collection of the Winnie the Pooh newspaper comics would have been much better as part of IDW's Library of American Comics. And speaking of those books lets do a little size comparison.
 

As you can see the Dark Horse book is a lot smaller in size than the Disney newspaper books from IDW. That was also a concern of me at first, but getting the book in hand the size didn't really bother me at all.

When printed in the newspapers the daily strips were in black and white while the Sunday pages usually were in colors. In the Dark Horse book all strips are colored, and the Sunday pages with completely new colors and not using the newspaper coloring as a guide like the IDW books.

Newspaper coloring (left) vs. new coloring (right)

When coloring the strips, the original texture effect for shadows and b/w coloring is also removed.

Texture removed when coloring

And all the dialogue is changed to a computer font rather than using the original hand lettering. But I didn't manage to find any examples where the actual dialogue was changed.

Original lettering (top) and computer lettering (bottom)

Original lettering (top) and computer lettering (bottom)

But I suspect that the computer lettering and coloring is not really done for this publication. They are probably updated for distribution to modern newspapers, online viewing and for easier translation. And this book is using those strips as the source material.

My biggest surprise in the book was at the very end. Here we got the three Winnie the Pooh serials created for The Treasury of Classic Tales series of Sunday pages. But the surprise was that these actually are reinked/redrawn versions of the Sunday pages, created with the modern character design. I had no idea this version of the comics existed! Again, this can be illustrated by comparing to IDW's Library of American Comics.

At the end of Treasury of Classic Tales vol.3 we get a preview page for the planned 4th volume, that was supposed to include the original version of the Pooh Sunday pages.

[Note: There was plans for four volumes, but the series was cancelled after the 3rd book due to poor sales. You can hear more about this in episode 6 of the LOAC podcast.]

Here's a panel by panel comparison of the original version and the new one:

Original Sunday page (top), and the new version (bottom)

Original Sunday page (top), and the new version (bottom)

Now I just wish someone would publish the complete run of the original one too!

Disney comics from Peachtree Playthings (Dollar Tree)

Online ad for new comics at Dollar Tree

Peachtree Playthings recently started publishing Disney comics, and I've checked out some of the first ones. According to their webpage they have a number of retail relationships, but I've only heard of these comics being sold at Dollar Tree in the USA – and that's what the online ads say too.

 

Peachtree Playthings retail relationships

The comics seems to be released in batches of 4, with the first ones in sale at the very end of last year. Titles include Mickey Mouse, Toy Story, Frozen and Disney Princess.

All the #1's from Peachtree Playthings

Two of the #2 issues from Peachtree Playthings

 
On the back of the comics we have an ad for the next number of the issue in hand and the other available comics from the same batch.
 

Back cover of Mickey Mouse #1 and #2

Looking at all the covers you would assume they are exact reprints of earlier comics from Marvel, Joe Books and IDW as the cover art, layout and logo are the same as used before.

Comics from IDW and Marvel compared to the Peachtree ones

Comics from Joe Books compared to the Peachtree ones

For the Toy Story comics and the Disney Princess comics that is actually true. They have the exact same comic pages inside as the Marvel and Joe Books issues. The Frozen comic from Peachtree have the same long story, but is missing the shorter story at end if Joe Books' earlier edition. The Mickey comics only have the shorter stories from the same IDW issues, while the rest of the content is made up of other short stories, but still taken from IDW's run of comics.

 

The contents in the two first Mickey Mouse issues (click to enlarge)

As you can see there's nothing new in any of the Peachtree editions if you already have been collecting American Disney comics the last decade. But I still think it's great that Disney comics are sold at Dollar Tree. And hopefully they are reaching a wider audience making them more popular.