Dutch Donald Duck Weekly 60 years!

Congratulations to Editor-in-chief Thom Roep and his crew, who are this week celebrating the 60th anniversary of their magazine, the Dutch Donald Duck weekly!

Above: Cover artwork for this week's regular issue 43 (left) and the celebratory extra edition readers found enclosed (right). The special issue has a 35 page comic story by Jan Kruse and Maximino Tortajada Aguilar, featuring every known Disney character. (Cover artwork by Ulrich Schröder).

Exactly 60 years ago, in october 1952, the first issue of the Dutch Donald Duck weekly was published. The magazine that would introduce comics featuring popular Disney characters in the Netherland, grew from just a few comic pages, published in the Dutch women's magazine 'Margriet' in 1951, into an actual magazine in October 1952. Ten consecutive issues were published that year, followed by the first full run of 52 issues in 1953.

Above: the first three issues of the Dutch Donald Duck Weekly in 1952. Back then, the covers were still created using artwork from the American magazines. The famous first issue cover (left) has something of a history to it. It was recreated using the same Al Taliaferro/Carl Barks artwork, used for the very first 'Kalle Anka & Co' and  'Donald Duck & Co' in 1948 in Sweden and Norway. A year later, it was also used for the very first 'Anders And & Co' in March 1949 in Denmark. So it was pretty much tradition to use that cover for the very first Dutch weekly. Half the magazine was printed in black & white back then, and it still only had 24 pages. The first complete full color issue was published on March 6, 1954. 

The second issue was reused from Dell's 'Walt Disney Comics & stories' #129 and has some great art by Bob Grant, while the third issue bared cover artwork by Carl Buettner from WDC&S #126. Most of the covers in the first two years however were done almost exclusively by the famous Walt kelly, re-used of course from Dell's American counter part magazine. That is, until the 40th issue in 1953 introduced the first official 'Dutch' Disney artist, Endre Lukács (1940-2001), who did all cover artwork from then on. Endre (or Andre) was originally a commercial artist from Hungary, who had moved to the Netherlands in 1930. For almost thirty years, until 1982, he would draw covers and do comic stories, assisted by his daughter Chris, who would provide the coloring of all his artwork. His first comic story was an eight page Donald Duck story, published in the magazine on March 6,1954 in the tenth issue of that year. Surely during the 1950's, almost every cover had art by Lukács.

Above: typical covers from the 1950's with artwork by Lucáks. Left is his first, from DD weekly 40, 1953. On the right side the cover for issue 39 from 1955, which captures the first appearance of Tom Poes ('Tom Puss') and Ollie B. Bommel, comic book characters created by the famous Dutch artist Marten Toonder (1912-2005). During the entire sixty years there have only been a handful of stories featuring non-Disney character, but Toonder's comics always held a steady place in the back end of the magazine since then.

The first story, 'Tom Poes and the magic apprentice' started in Donald Duck Weekly 40, in October 1955. While the characters were already famous, as there had been many stories published in newspapers in a different format (story and dialogues below Black & white images, with typically three images in a panel). 72 stories were published,  which resulted in 31 comic books. Just like Disney, Marten Toonder had his own studio, and most of the stories were created by his staff of talented artists. 

Above left: Marten Toonder, Middle: Dick Matena. Right: Tom Poes and Olivier Bommel. Many of the later  comic stories were created by Dick Matena, who also drew a lot of Disney stories for the magazine. By the way the Toonder studio, just like the main character Olivier B. Bommel, was situated in an actual Castle (Castle Nederhorst). They also created lot's of animations, the most famous one, probably being their feature 'Als je begrijpt wat ik bedoel' ('Dexter the Dragon and Bumble the bear') which of course starred Tom Poes and Bommel and was released in 1983.

Sixty years of celebrations.

Over the course of sixty years, the magazine turned into one of the main supplier of Disney stories. A lot of Dutch artists became internationally known through the work they created for the magazine, most notably of course Daan Jippes, who was also Art Director for the magazine from 1975 to 1980. Afterwards he traveled to the US and worked on numerous animated features for the Disney studios. Today, most notable Disney authors working directly for the magazine the brothers Mau and Bas Heymans, Wilma van den Bosch and Michel Nadorp, who does all the in-house created cover artwork.
   

In the past the Dutch weekly has seen it's share of festivities throughout it's existence, which meant a special issue was published, often having with a contest of some sort and lot's of prizes to be had. Below is the three page cover by Daan Jippes from issue 43 in 1977, celebrating it's 25th anniversary.

In October 2002, the magazine celebrated it's 50th anniversary. Below the three page spread cover with art by  Michel Nadorp.

Donald Duck pocket 200.

Seems like more congratulations are in order, as the crew of the Dutch Donald Duck weekly have put together their 200th paperback pocketbook, which will be out July 19th! Published monthly by Sanoma in the Netherlands and Belgium, the series usually collects ten or so longer stories by celebrated Italian Duck artists like Massimo Fecchi, Romano Scarpa and Giorgio Cavazano, with a lot of stories penned by American writers such as Paul Halas, Pat & Carol McGreal and Michael Gilbert. The covers are always done excellently by Dutch Disney artist Michel Nadorp.

This is actually the 200th book in the third series, which started in February 1992. The second series, also had 53 pocketbooks and ran from July 1977 to October 1991. The first series ran from May 1970 to December 1975, carrying eleven pocketbooks.

Below: Covers from the first issues of each run. From left to right: Marco Rota's illustration for the very first pocketbook from 1970, which was also used for issue 89 of the third run from September 2002, which was actually a fascimile reprint of that first book. The title on the cover ('The Zebra Mussel') refers to the first story inside, the 54 page 'Paperino e le conchiglie zebrate' by the Italian brothers Abramo and Giampaolo Barosso, with artwork by Carpi.

Middle: The premier issue of the second run from July 1977 has Barks illustration 'Sailing the Spanish Main' from 1949 on the cover. The title ('On the search for the Magic Eye') refers to one of the Italian stories inside, the 30 page 'Zio Paperone e 'l'occhio di zampirone' by Rodolfo Cimino and Giorgio Cavazano. Right: In February 1992, the first book of the current run was published, which contained the seven part 'Le sette meraviglie dei paperi' ('The Seven Wonders of the World'), a 227-page story by Fabio Michelini with art by Giuseppe Dalla Santa and Marizio Amendola. This issue also had the first cover by Michel Nadorp, who has done all covers diligently since.

Above: 'The Fantastic River Race' by Carl Barks was one of the stories in the very first pocket from May 1970. It was originally first published in Dell Comics' 'Uncle Scrooge goes to Disneyland' from August 1957. As you can see from these pages, the pocketbooks were then still partly printed in Black & white.

Above: After the first hundred of the current run, the editors came up with the idea that all these little books should also look nice on the shelf at home, so they decided that each issue would contain a small part of a larger illustration on the back which, spread out over 16 or 17 books, make up one of Carl Barks' classic paintings (reworked by Tony Fernandez from the Spanish Comicup studios). The current pockets (191 to 207) contain his illustration 'A Binful of Fun' from 1974 (click the painting to check it out full scale!)

By the way, The Dutch Donald Duck Weekly currently celebrates it's 60th year of existence, as the first issue dates back from October 25, 1952, so it seems they're in for a few more parties this year! Cheers guys! 

Great Minds...

Above: 'Dodo and the Frog' by Otto Feuer, from 'Funny Stuff' issue 48, August 1949. Below: cover for the Dutch Donald Duck Weekly issue 27, 2005 by Disney artist Ulrich Schroder (according to Inducks, based on an idea by artist/animator Arjan Wilschut). Schroeder's original concept designs and final art are featured at the bottom.

'Dodo and the Frog' was created by German animator Otto Feuer, and was published in 'Funny Stuff' comic magazine by National Comics, which later turned into DC Comics (after their first magazine 'Detective Comics'). Check the early logo, already present on the covers since 1940. The publisher of 'Batman' and 'Superman' became known as 'DC Comics' but didn't take on that name officially until 1977.

Otto Feuer worked in the 1930's as an animator at the Fleischer and Famous Animation studios, where he was part of the team that created Paramount's first animated feature film 'Gulliver's Travels' in 1939. Like so many animators in those days, he started working as a comic artist in 1943. DC's 'Funny Stuff magazine' started publishing his comic featuring Dunbarr Dodo & Fennimore Frog in 1947. It was written by Woody Gelman and became part of DC's 'Comic Cavalcade' magazine between 1948 and 1954. In October that year Funny Stuff was renamed 'The Dodo & The Frog. Publication came to a halt after issue 92 in November 1957.

Click to enlarge the concept sketches, or hit the link 'Great Minds' in the column right for more stuff.

Great Minds...

'Giggle Comics' 57 from September 1948 and the cover for the Donald Duck weekly 41 from 2008. The first cover shows Dan Gordon's 'Superkatt', the other cover was drawn by German Disney artist Ulrich Schröder. Gordon was the lead storyboard artist at Hannah-Barbera and was responsable for the character designs of 'The Flintstones'.

'Mob of the Haunted Mansion': my Disney story reprinted.

As of this week you can find one of my Comic stories for Disney collected in the Summer Holiday Special, published by Sanoma and for sale at all the HEMA stores!

Well, it's official: it's summer alright! And to celebrate it, all the major Comic publishers here come out with their own Summer Holiday Special! Sanoma had already recently published their usual Disney books: The regular 'Donald Duck Summer Holiday 2011' comic book special (which has appeared every year since 1978) and'the 'Beagle Boys Summer Holiday 2011' comic book. They're filled with comic reprints, games and trivia and the usual coloring page, which should keep your kids busy, while you're trying get your family to your place of destination alive, at least, that's the idea!

Reprint.

The HEMA concern, a nationwide chain of department stores, which has also branched out in Germany and Belgium, teamed up with the folks at Sanoma Media to create their own line of Summer Holiday Books this year. They all have the same graphic design on the cover, sharing the title 'Op vakantie met' ('On holiday with') and focus on different characters like 'Nijntje', 'Barbapapa', 'Nickelodeon', 'Hello Kitty' and of course: 'Donald Duck' !

It's nice to see the guys at Disney had chosen one of my stories for the 'Donald Duck' version. 'Gespuis in 't spookhuis', ( 'Mob of the Haunted Mansion') is a good lenghty thriller with some nice plot twists and enough laughs to cheer it all up. I can understand they wanted to reprint it again, as it keeps you to your seat long enough and definitely intices a re-read.

Originally it was 15 pages longer even, and I got it back the first time around from Tom Roep (editor in chief) saying it was way too long! (I primarely used to read the 'Barks library' books and they all have these huge stories in them, so I guess I modeled it after that).

Above: two pages from 'Mob of the Mansion' as it was first published in 2001. The Disney crew had designed their Weekly magazine around the story (the issue had black pages) with a contest winning you some cool prizes and games for your Nintendo handheld.

'Hall of Fame'.

'Mob of the Haunted Mansion' was one of the stories I did with Bas Heymans for the Donald Duck Weekly, it's a 20 page story, first printed in May 2001 and it has definitely been picked up abroad, as it was translated in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland and Norway. In the Netherlands, the story even made the cover of 'Donald Duck's Funniest Adventures' #4 and it also served for the cover of issue 32 of Disney's 'Hall of Fame' comic book series in Norway.

One of my other stories done for Disney, 'Donald Duck: Temporarily Millionaire' (also with Bas Heymans) was published in April this year in 'Aku Ankka Ekstra' issue 156 in Finland. (the monthly 'Donald Duck Extra' magazine). Below: various covers from around the world, which published the ghost story in their respective comic magazines. The Dutch cover is the last one on the right.

The other three stories in Hema's 'Donald Duck Summer Comic Book' Special are 'The Caravan Race' by Ben Verhagen and Jan Kruse, 'Timber' by Paul Halas with Flor Collins and Vicar and 'The Egyptian Prince's Secret' by Marco Rota. The books are for sale now in all the HEMA stores and cost € 4,00 Euro's each.

HEMA has 445 department stores in The Netherlands, 62 in Belgium, 8 in Germany, 3 in Luxembourg and recently opened 4 stores in Paris, France!

Carl Barks' 'Somewhere Beyond Nowhere' finally published.

This week, the Dutch Donald Duck magazine finally featured 'Somewhere beyond Nowhere', the last twelve page comic plotted by none other then Carl Barks himself in 1996!

The story was originally called 'Somewhere in Nowhere', with a script by John Lustig and art/inks done by Pat Block. Intended as a ten-pager it was turned into a longer story (two times 14 pages, so 28 in total) which was first published in Italian in November 2000. Artwork for this reworked version (with a slightly different title) was of course done by Dutch Disney artist Daan Jippes (left), based on a new script by Lustig, which keeps closer to Barks' original outline.

This is the first time ever this story features in the Dutch DD Weekly magazine, the original version was only published in the so-called 'Winterbook' in 2002, a special compilation of stories and little puzzles, published yearly during the holiday season in The Netherlands and Belgium since 1980.
Jippes has already recreated many of the later Duck stories Barks wrote, as he's really the only one who's perfected his way of drawing to emulate Barks own comic style.

The Jippes Version (2008).

Jippes' version, created in 2008 for Danish publisher Egmont was first published in Finland (Aku Ankka 11) in March last year, followed by Denmark (Anders And & Co. 15) and Sweden (Kalle Anka & Co. 15) in April. (Swedish translation was done by Reine Mårtensson, Danish version by Thomas Harder and the Dutch version by Jos Beekman.) The story was published in the USA last february by Boom Kids in 'Donald Duck' issue 363!

Check out this weeks great cover:

Barks final Duck Story.

The original story for 'Somewhere in Nowhere' was plotted by Barks in 1996 on his way to Orlando, Florida. (Barks was at the age of 95 then!)  John Lustig was hired as a freelancer by the Carl Barks Studio to write up the script, while Pat Block created the artwork, which he finished in April 1997.

Carl Barks (left) and John Lustig (middle) with Pat Block (right) in 1997 at Barks' birthday celebration at Disney World. Block shows his finished artwork for 'Somewhere in Nowhere'.
According to Block, Daan Jippes was already involved back then. Bill Grandey, Barks' manager had first asked Jippes to do the artwork and layout as well as flesh out the story, which grew from an initial tenpager into a more voluminous story, but he never got to make the final artwork. Having other commitments (apparently working on Disney's 'Tarzan' feature animation) Block was called in to do the job, which he gladly took upon him.

Although the story was finished in 1997, It wasn't published until Disney Italia aquired it and published it in a numbered, limited hardcover book in November 2000 (after Barks had passed away on August 25 at the age of nearly 100 years).

Beneath: cover of the orginal 28 page version, as published in the US in 2005 (Gemstone's Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge no.1). It features original concept art by Barks with final artwork done by Pat Block with colors by Gemstone's assistant editor Sue Kolberg:

Carl Barks' original plot for the story, as set up by himself back then:

Here's the original concept art sketch for the US cover from the master himself, and some preliminary artwork for page 13B (by Block) with notes. Underneath that the resulting colored page:

John Lustig wrote a lot of Disney stories and cooperated on  many of them with American Disney artist William van Horn. Beside scripts for Disney, he also writes for his own comic 'Last Kiss', based on artwork from old romance comics. Make sure to check out his official Last Kiss homepage or the entry on his blog on the rewrite with Daan here (with some Black/White original artwork too!)

Disney artist Pat Block continues to draw comics and is married to Egmont script writer Shelly Block. They always work together on their Disney stories. Check out her twitter page.  

Saving Classics for a Rainy Day.

Althought climate changes seem to be on the news 24/7, I've always been able to count on one thing this time of the year, and the weather hasn't let me down this time: It's raining cats and dogs and it doesn't seem to stop any time soon. So maybe a good time to grab some classic comics and check out the timeless idea's of yesteryear.

Above: 'Jingle Jangle Comics' 22 from August 1946 (cover artwork by Larz Bourne) and the Dutch Donald Duck Weekly 42, October 2010 (cover by Michel Nadorp). Below: Endre Lukacs, working for the Dutch Donald Duck weekly in the 1950's, created similar cover artwork for the magazine in July 1956.

'Jingle Jangle Comics' was a bimonthly full color comics magazine, published between February 1942 and December 1949 by the Eastern Color Printing Company under their "Famous Funnies" label. 'Famous Funnies' are still considered to be the first true comic books in the USA, following Dell's 'The Funnies' from 1929 and Eastern's 'Funnies on Parade' from 1929.

Main artist for Jingle magazine was George Carlson, born in 1887, just ten years after the reconstruction era officially ended which followed the American civil war from 1861-1865. (His mother had actually worked for General Ulysses S.Grant, who became the 18th president of the restored USA.)

Carlson had become very famous in 1936 for his cover design of Margeret Mitchell's debut novel, which sold over a million copies in less than  half a year and would earn her the Pulitzer price the next year:

 "Gone with the wind" would be her only novel. Mitchell died tragically in 1949 while crossing the street, unable to avoid a speeding car.  Carlson was there right from the beginning of the magazine and did at least two stories for each issue. Other authors were Dave Tendlar, who was an animator for the Fleischer studio's (Betty Boop, Popey the Sailor), Jack Ehret, R.Johnson, Doug Anderton and Larz Bourne (see covers) who also animated with Tendlar for the "Famous" Studio aka Paramount Cartoon Studio. As you can see from the covers above, the classics still rule. Beneath you can catch some of the 24th issue from December 1946, the story features characters "Bingo and Glum"!

Bernado on the cutting edge.

Seeing there aren’t too many artists out there working for Disney that also did superhero stuff, I thought I would talk some about Bernado, who's work is featured regulary in the Dutch Donald Duck Weekly magazine. This week they had one of his 'Mad madam Mim' shorts. This guy is amazing, it’s so reminiscent of the 1950's! Anyway, Seeing Bernado (That is José Ramon Bernadó) also did a lot of stuff back in the 1990's for Marvel and DC, I was even more impressed. Because there are a lot of great artists out there working for Marvel, but there aren’t really many that can pull of committing themselves to Disneyesque stuff too. Beside Madam Mim, Bernado also draws a lot of 'Scamp' shorts for the Dutch DD, in the same classic style (see below).

'Mad madam Mim' first appeared in Disney’s eighteenth animated classic, 'The Sword in the Stone', which was based on 1938 the novel by English author T.H. White (1906 - 1964). White’s novel was eventually published as part of a tetralogy (a book divided into four parts) called 'The Once and Future King', although a fifth installment ('The Book of Merlin') was published separately after White’s death in 1971.

Disney’s animation followed the same storyline as White’s books, and focused on the education of a young, adolescent King Arthur by the magician Merlin. The animated feature film was released on Christmas day 1963, it would be the last animation they released while Walt Disney himself was still alive. Madam Mim was of course animated by two of Disney’s 'Nine Old Men' (the nine most import animators ever at his studio): Milt Kahl (1909 - 1987) and Frank Thomas (1912 - 2004). Kahl designed the characters from storyboards by Bill Peet (1915 - 2002) who was the only storyman ever at Disney who did all the storyboards for an entire animated feature film by himself, while also writing the script and doing all the character designs! Below: Original Poster for the theatrical release of 'The Sword in the Stone' in 1963.

José Ramón Bernado Neff was born on February 19, 1965 in Villanova I la Geltrú, a small Spanish fishing town in the Catalonia province near Barcelona. Bernado’s comics are full of temperament with plenty of characteristics and really reminiscent of the old 50’s Disney stories, featuring Scamp and other animation characters.

In his youth, Bernado honed his art skills looking at the work of American Comic stars John Buscema (The Avenger, Silver Surfer) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby). In the 1980’s Bernado started working in the animation field as a storyboard artist and worked on series as 'Mofli, El Ultimo Koala'.
He worked for several animation studio’s, such as Acció, Oniria Pictures and Munich Animation, (creators of the popular animated feature 'Help! I’m a Fish' (2000) with main animator Jesper Møller (from “All dogs go to heaven” and “Ferngully, the last Rainforest”).

Bernado started working on Disney characters in the early ‘90’s through the Comicup studio in Barcelona. Working on Mickey and Goofy stories for Mondadori in Italy and Egmont in Denmark.
For Disney France Bernado would draw the Ducktales stories with L’íl Bad Wolf and Ellsworth (the black bird from Bill Walsh’s Mickey Mouse newspaper strip from 1949). For the Dutch weekly he did stories featuring Dumbo and Basil the Mouse Detective. In 1995 Bernado was offered to come work for American publisher Marvel Comics. Bernado worked with inker Rodney Gates on their 'Mantra' series (issue 23), written by Mike W. Barr (who also wrote for the 1993 Marvel series 'Break-Thru' with penciler George Perez). Bernado would crossover to DC Comics and draw for their series 'Justice League Task Force' (issues 25, 27/30 and issues 33/37). JLTF was a spinoff of Justice League Europe, one of the three Justice League series at that time. 'Europe' ran from 1989 to 1993, while the 'Taskforce' series was published monthly, between June 1993 and August 1996.

A total of 37 issues of the 'Taskforce' series were published. Also working on the series was writer Mark Waid (born March 21, 1962), former editor of fan magazine 'Amazing Heroes'. Waid also served as editor for DC in the late eighties. Waid possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of comics history and trivia and also serves as DC Comics' unofficial historian.



Above: Mantra 23 (July 1995) Bernado with writer Mike Barr and inker Rodney Gates, DC Showcase 7 (August 1995). For JLTF 28 (October 1995) Bernado worked with writer Scott Cien. Bernado also did the cover art for this issue.

Bernado also worked on DC’s 'Superboy' from issue 32 to 37 and 39 to 40 (on the ”Meltdown” storyline with writer Ron Marz) and he cooperated on the DC Showcase V1 # 7 with writer Scott Cien in “A Shadow over Eden”. In 1996 he took on Marvel's popular character Wolverine. For Wolverine # 98 he worked with Marvel editor/writer and 'Bucky O’Hare' creator Larry Hama on the 'Fade to Black' chapter. Below:  'Superboy' by Bernado, he also did the covers for these issues in 1996.

In 1997 Bernado did the artwork for Marvel's X-Man Annual with writer Christopher Golden. (from
'The Punisher: Purgatory' and  'Wolverine/ Punisher: Revelation') for this, Bernado also created the cover artwork and did the inks himself. The next year,  Bernado expanded upon Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s creation from 1966, 'The Silver Surfer', in the 'Silver Surfer/Thor Annual'.
For Marvel, Bernado also cooperated with former editor-in-chief Terry Kavanagh for the 1998 two part miniseries 'Fury/Agent 13', written by Kavanagh, in which Sharon Carter aka Agent 13 brings Nick Fury from SHIELD back from the dead, after having been killed off by the Punisher. (Well, he wasn’t actually dead, he was in trapped in another dimension battling his own experiences from WWII).

Above: X-Man annual 1997 with writer Christopher Golden, for Silver Surfer Annual (1998) Bernado worked with writer Tom deFalco. The Nick Fury miniseries from 1998 with Terry Kavanagh. After 1998, Bernado returned to the European comics scene and started working again on stories for Disney France. For the Dutch Donald Duck weekly he specializes in stories featuring classic Disney characters like 'Mad Madam Mim', 'Little Hiawatha'  and 'Dumbo'.

By the way, Boom! Studio’s announced they're putting out a new 'Chip ‘n’Dale Rescue Rangers' series before 2011, done by Leonel Castellani, so okay, there’s another one who can switch styles on demand. Castellani, of course is particularly known for his job on David & Goliath, which he did back in 2004 for Image.