One of my favorites from everything Disney comics last year is the book Donald Duck im Mickey Mouse Weekly von William Ward, published by the German fan club D.O.N.A.L.D. (Deutsche Organisation nichtkommerzieller Anhänger des lauteren Donaldismus). The title and the introduction article is written in German, but the comic pages inside are facsimile copies from the British Mickey Mouse Weekly and in English.
The book collects all the Donald Duck serials by William Ward in chronological order which is a total of 135 comic book pages. In addition, there is a four-page article and a few pages with cover galleries.
These stories are super rare and only collected once before in the Italian Paperino: Le inedite follie inglesi di William A. Ward. I've been trying to get hold of a copy of the Italian book for years, and I wish I had it to compare. But unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anyone selling it for a reasonable price and willing to send internationally yet.
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| Italian book reprinting the same stories |
The comics in the German book are scanned from the personal collection of a German collector, so I'm pretty sure the two books use different sources.
Comparing the book to the original British comics it's reprinted in a lot smaller format. But I guess production cost would have been way to high reproducing it in the same size. And I don't think this book had much of a budget as it's made by fans for fans.
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| The book on top of Mickey Mouse Weekly #67 |
Most of the reproduction is pretty good considering and according to a note only three pages had to be partly restored.
As I got the original comics I tried to compare the restored pages to the original. In the first case I could seriously not spot anything that could have been restored!
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| Original comic vs the book - could not spot what had been restored on this page. |
On the second restored page it's easier to see what has been done, as the text is partly restored in a new font, and some of the words are guessed wrong.
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| Restoration to the left, original to the right |
The last restored page just has some minor restoration in the upper corner, and I also noticed partly missing text in a panel at the bottom.
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| Restoration to the left, original to the right |
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Another mistake in the book is that one page is missing. But the page got printed separately, numbered 15 ½ and came as an attachment.
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| Missing page as attachment |
But overall, I'm impressed with the work on this book and it's still awesome! It's mainly created just to make the comics available for anyone wanting to do research or just read these early Donald stories. I'm not sure about the print run, but when I write this it looks like they still have copies for sale.
Not sure if there is any meaning behind changing the flag on the cover to an European Union flag though. The illustration is taken from the Mickey Mouse Weekly #66 cover, celebrating the upcoming coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
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Hi! I'm one of the editors of Italian issue about Ward which came out in 2013.
ReplyDeleteIt's good you have given some infos about this German book I have not.
I'd like to know... have you the 4 Wilfred Haughton's Goofy stories for 1930s Mickey Mouse Weekly??
Thanks and Regards,
Federico (mozenrathottantas@libero.it)
Hi, the flag on the cover had to be changed because Disney didn´t allow the Union Jack... Strange, isn´t it? I think they had forgotten that it was the original cover flag.
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