Monday, February 18, 2019

"Disney Afternoon Giant" and versions of "Rightful Owners"

First three issues of IDW's Disney Afternoon Giant
First three issues of IDW's Disney Afternoon Giant

When IDW changed the lineup of Disney comics at the end of last year, one of the new series we saw was "Disney Afternoon Giant". I am a bit surprised IDW would do this series, not really because of the title, but more of the content. A lot of people growing up in the 90's loved the Disney Afternoon animated series on TV and I guess this can (could have been) be a nostalgic series for those. Kids these days probably have no idea what "Disney Afternoon" is all about, but people growing up with the TV-series might have kids of their own now, and could see something they once loved and pick it up for their kids.

But the new series is just a reprint of stories from the last time we saw Disney Afternoon comics in the shop. They were originally published by BOOM! In 2010/2011, and I guess most people being a Disney Afternoon fan now, was a fan back then too. So there's nothing new or exciting about the new series - it's simply a reprint of not-so-old material.

The first issues of the new IDW series have the DuckTales serial Rightful Owners and
Worldwide Rescue with Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers. The early solicitation text in the Previews catalog mentioned Darkwing Duck too, but we have yet to see any stories with him in the new series.

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The 3rd issue from IDW is on sale right now and have the 3rd part of "Rightful Owners" that got a lot of attention the first time it was published. The series was printed in four parts by BOOM! (under the name "kaboom!" for a little while) in 2011, and later collected in a TPB.
 

Original comics with "Rightful Owners"



TPB collecting "Rightful Owners"

BOOM!'s issue #3 got rushed out and had an unfinished version of the story printed, where one page was not properly colored and another just had a bunch of clip-and-paste art to replace unfinished artwork! Other pages had arguably very bad artwork too. This didn't get by unnoticed by fans and we had blogs and forum discussions telling how bad things were.

In the trade paperback however, the coloring was finished and the clip-and-paste art got replaced by a properly drawn page. See the comparison below.



From BOOM!'s DuckTales #3 (left) and the TPB (right)

From BOOM!'s DuckTales #3 (left) and the TPB (right)
 
And now for the big question, how does the same pages look in the IDW print? Well, you can see for yourself blow.



From BOOM!'s DuckTales #3 (left) and IDW's Disney Afternoon Giant (right)

From BOOM!'s DuckTales #3 (left) and IDW's Disney Afternoon Giant (right)

For some reason IDW actually used the unfinished version of the story as printed in BOOM!'s DuckTales #3! If they plan on doing a trade collecting the story, I hope someone tells the editors about this so they can track down the proper version.

Edit Feb 23, 2019:

From the comments on this post I was made aware of changes to the first part of "Rightful Owners" too, and did some comparisons. You can see more examples on squeakyboots13's twitter.


Black and blue eyes

Blue clothes changed to green

The two examples above are both from the first part of the story, and as you can see the in the first one BOOM!'s TPB and IDW's version have the same coloring, while in the second both BOOM! prints have the same coloring while the IDW one is different. So there's three different color edits for the first part.

In the prints where Webby's eyes are blue, this is not the case for the whole story just in a few panels – so I guess this is an error and not intentional.

In the TPB we also have a panel with the nephew's clothes colored black. But they are not in the rest of the story, so this is also an error. But it's a bit strange that we didn't see the same error in the first print.




In IDW's digital edition the entire page with this panel is missing the dialogue. This tells us that the story is created with the speech balloons as a different layer above the artwork, and not as part of the art. This makes it easier to make adjustments when translating the story.

The dialogue also has minor changes in all parts.





Above we can see the soda names are changed in IDW's version. The native's language is also changed to proper English, probably to not sound offensive.





I also have a Norwegian print of the same story. I'm not going to bother with a detailed comparison with that edition, but the Norwegian print did use the page with finished artwork not used by IDW – and it shouldn't be too hard to get hold of.


Norwegian print with the finihed artwork in part 3.


6 comments:

  1. Back when the first issue of this reprint series came out, I compared Rightful Owners Part 1 and there were a bunch of weird changes from the version originally released by Boom throughout. Including a page with all of its dialogue missing somehow. https://twitter.com/squeakyboots13/status/1061084040533590016

    I have a feeling that this series was just a quick cashgrab job with no real effort put into it and it will probably be cancelled after issue 4.

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    1. Thanks for this info, I didn't know there were changes to the first part in the different prints. I did some comparisons too, and have a few comments:
      - Webby's blue eyes is there in the TPB too
      - The panel where Dewey is replaced with Louie have blue clothes in both Boom! prints, but is changed to green in IDW's print
      - The page with missing dialogue has dialogue in IDW's printed comic. So that must be a mistake in the digital version. But I found something else strange on this page, in the 3rd row panel with the nephews they actually have black clothes in the TPB!
      - The soda joke seems to have been removed for IDW's print. The dialogue is the same for both Boom! prints.

      I did a quick check for differences in part 2, and we have the soda names changed there too. Also, the native's dialogue is changed to not be offensive, ex. "Sound come from bush. We check" is changed to "There's a sound coming from the bush..."

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    2. Okay. I have a theory as to what's going on with this reprint. I think IDW is using an early, unfinalized version of the story as the basis for what they're releasing. Things like Webby's blue eyes and the panels with messed up coloring were likely errors that Boom had corrected before releasing their printed version. (And then Webby's eyes slipped through the cracks again in the trade release.) Since issue 3 was rushed out, Boom didn't take the time to make any corrections for that issue which resulted in the mess that was. It's possible Disney never got the materials made for the updated trade release version as Boom was about to lose the license with Disney very shortly after. So the editors at IDW working on Disney Afternoon Giant were given these unfinished versions of the issues and didn't care to fix anything up besides making sure the dialogue from the natives was politically correct.

      This means that if Darkwing Duck ever got reprinted under this series, they would likely end up using the original Boom versions of the issues instead of the revised Definitively Dangerous Edition versions.

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    3. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on with the different edits, but everything is probably a result of the story being rushed out in the first place. I updated the post with some examples, including a picture of the Norwegian edition where they used the finished page in part 3. If the Norwegian editors were given that version it shouldn't be too hard for IDW to get hold of a copy.

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  2. Hmm... Okay this is interesting. Inducks also claims that the version printed in this Dutch book https://inducks.org/issue.php?c=nl%2FPREM+++8#e has the redrawn page as well. That same book also includes the Dangerous Currency crossover which had been previously dismissed as unofficial by Disney. I guess there isn't really any way of knowing what's going on besides it coming down to IDW not paying attention to or caring about what they're printing.

    Rightful Owners has also been printed in Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany but Inducks doesn't give any indication about which versions were used for them.

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  3. Very interesting entry, thanks! I've the french edition, and it has the old and ugly version of page 63.

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