"That Missing Candelabra"

Right now you're probably not wondering, hey--what happened to those "Disney Literature Classics" you were all het up about?  What's going on here?  Where am I?  Who am I?  But that's too bad, 'cause I'm gonna tell you anyway.
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"Scrooge's Second Childhood"

A thing of note is the fact that post-Western US Disney comics saw a far greater variety of reprinted "classic" Western mouse stories than they did duck stories. Think about it: as far as mouse material goes, you not only had Gottfredson, but you also had lots and lots of Paul Murry, as well as more Bill Wright and Dick Moores than you might expect. Whereas when you look at the duck material, it was virtually all Barks, with a very few Tony Strobl stories thrown in, and even fewer from other artists. I think this reflects the fact that there's much more of a critical consensus about duck comics: everyone agrees that Barks is the best, and there's a lot of Barks to reprint, so that's that. Whereas when it comes to mouse material...well, things are much more fragmented. Pretty much everyone agrees that Gottfredson is number one,* but of course, Gottfredson wasn't writing comic-book stories, even if his earlier work was oft reprinted in that form. Since original stories came to replace the Gottfredson reprints, and since more kids were surely reading comic books than the comics page, there's a lot of nostalgic fondness for Murry (in my opinion, sporadically-merited at best, but that's an argument for another time), but Murry still didn't have the hegemony that Barks did in his realm, so even tertiary artists get their moments in the sun.
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"The Secret of Atlantis"

Kind of somber for the first post of 2012, but I must note with sadness the passing, yesterday, of Victor Arriagada Ríos (Vicar), at the age of seventy-seven. In the past, I've joked that, in fact, Vicar drew every duck comic ever, and if you should ever note any counter-examples, they're just figments of your imagination. You know what I mean if you've paid attention to Disney comics from Disney's publishing tenure on: the man's work was absolutely everywhere; I'd be willing to bet a modest sum of money that, Barks aside, no artist was published as often in the post-Western era. On the Disney Comics Forum, I wondered aloud whether he was in fact the most prolific Disney artist ever; administrator cacou crunched the numbers and determined that no, in terms of total number of panels, he's "only" number six--though if you're talking about total number of stories, he's second only to Tony Strobl. An impressive legacy for sure.
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