Boom! jumps in with both feet

So it seems that Boom! isn't messing around: they really do intend to bring back the classics with a vengeance, as can be seen from their planned Februrary releases and these mouth-watering trade paperbacks slated for Summer releases. Good show. Great show, even. Some miscellaneous observations:
It looks like the "Walk Disney's Comics and Stories Archive" is going to overlap with the Fantagraphics MM collections, and it raises the question: does Boom! now also have permission to print the formerly-verboten strips? If so, it just goes to show: it never rains racist Mickey Mouse comics but it pours.

I wonder how closely this archive is going to try to reproduce the actual WDCs from the forties. I REALLY hope they respect the history as much as possible and don't lard the books up with ads as has been their unfortunate wont in the past.

It has to be said, they ARE a bit overly obsessed with giving us Jippes redraws of Barks scripts previously done by others. They've positively fetishized the phrase "the classic Barks style." I can see where this comes from--it's a way of sorta kinda pretending we're dealing with new Barks material even though not really. But it's also kind of absurd, because, look people, I like Jippes fine, but HIS ART IS NOT THE SAME AS BARKS,' and wouldn't it be boring if it were? Crikey.

On that note, I REALLY, REALLY PROFOUNDLY take exception to the fact that there's a Jippes redrawing of "Somewhere in Nowhere" which is now apparently going to become the "official" version. According to the Gemstone printing of the story, Jippes was originally slated to be the artist, but he wasn't available at the time, so Pat Block (who had a personal relationship with Barks) did the job. You can legitimately object to the drawings of Barks' scripts by Tony Strobl or Kay Wright; I don't really have a problem with them, but I can see why you might. That does not apply here, though: Block is just a great duck artist; even if he wasn't the first choice, his work on the story leaves nothing to be desired. Given that; given that, if anything, his art looks MORE Barksian than Jippes;' and given how tragically little duck artwork he's done, there's just no good reason whatsoever to sweep his work under the rug in this fashion. Or any fashion. I'm calling bullshit, like so: Bullshit. Bullshit! BULLSHIT!

UPDATE TO ABOVE: Joakim Gunnarsson on the Disney Comics Forum clarifies that--contrary to what the Boom! post indicates--this isn't actually a redrawing of the Lustig script; it's a whole new thing based on the Barks outline. That's a bit less egregious in some sense, but I still have to vigorously question the purpose of such a thing, which still seems designed to render the original version obsolete. This scramble on Jippes' part to make his mark on every last Barks-related thing strikes me as a bit unseemly!

A US printing of Geoffrey Blum's "Saga of Captain Duckburg!" Sweet! I remember well seeing that on inducks and thinking, meh. Now we'll NEVER get it. Wrong, was I, and glad to be. I'll write about some of Blum's handful of duck stories one of these days; some of them are quite good and some of them (his imagining of "Race for the Golden Apples," eg) are pretty dreadful, but the man deserves big-time RESPEK for all his critical work on Barks. If not for him, this blog would not exist.

Those Don Rosa TPBs: okay, yeah, I'll probably buy them, even though I already own every Rosa story, but I have to say it: WOW, do you ever get shafted if you're Don Rosa. Given the massive popularity and many, many reprints of his work, the man ought to be rich. But--correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong--you don't GET royalties if you're a Disney artist. You sell your work to a publisher, and that's that as far as you're concerned. Which might not be so bad if you can churn stuff out and if you're not so well-loved that your work is reprinted all over creation, but when (per Don himself) you're not naturally artistically inclined and your work is obsessively, meticulously detailed and your name gets trotted out endlessly to sell stuff without you making a penny from it--man, that must be truly galling. I don't mean to devalue anyone else's work here, but it really seems to me that Rosa is in a uniquely unfortunate situation. If you're reading this, Don, know that I keenly feel for you.

I don't think we have to worry anymore about seeing new Van Horn in English. I just wish they'd get on with it so I could know for SURE.

I'm the most excited about Disney's Four-Color Adventures. SO MUCH AWESOMENESS.

Overall, this is just great stuff. I wasn't into Disney during the interregnum between Gladstone and Gemstone, so I haven't until now had the dry-spell experience that a lot of people had. But I'm very excited that Boom! seems to finally be getting it, and I will definitely be supporting them with my dollar.