Gemstone Ratings

Hey, you know what I'm wondering right about now?  It's this: WHY HAS NO NEW US DISNEY PUBLISHER EMERGED?!?  Step the fuck up to the plate, you assholes!

Well, I've recently been filling up the last holes in my collection of Gemstone titles, so to pass the time while we're waiting, I thought I might evaluate each of their lines and see how they look in retrospect.  You know: just the usual self-indulgent mucking around you've come to expect from this blog.

Donald Duck & Friends
I feel like it may be terribly hypocritical for me to criticize this comic for an overuse of Barks reprints, given that the initial reason I purchased issues of it was for, er, Barks reprints.  Duck reprints in general seem a bit too easy: for mouse material, you really have to cast around, but with ducks, you can just slap down some Barks stuff and call it a day.  As much as I don't think "Og's Iron Bed" is a particularly great story, I very much appreciate its inclusion, and wish there had been more of an effort to break outside the usual Barks hegemony.  And unless I'm forgetting something, there was no Italian material in this book.  C'mon, now!  The new material was, as usual, a bit hit-or-miss, but plenty of it was worth reading.
B+

Mickey Mouse & Friends
See what I said about the difference between duck and mouse reprints?  There's no single, established source for mouse reprints, so you must scour comicsdom far and wide.  But the rewards are great, if you can do it well: you can bring back into the public eye quality material that's been almost completely forgotten.  You just can't get that effect with Barks reprints.  And let it be said: this publication did a truly excellent job of this.  I know my recent entry on one such reprint wasn't exactly favorable, but hell, that story was still sorta fun in an unintentional, goofy-as-hell way.  And that's just the beginning, as the book printed some stories the goodness of which surprised me and that I would never have heard of otherwise: "The Rajah's Treasure" and "The World Under the Sea" make me think that Bill Wright is very unfairly neglected, and a lot better than Paul Murry*--though Murry acquits himself well enough with "The Ruby Eye of Homar-Guy-Am" and--even though I usually kinda hate the Phantom Blot as a recurring villain--"The Return of" same.  Coulda stood a few more Italian stories--the two Scarpa joints that appeared here weren't that impressive--but hey, at least they made the effort.  Quality Egmont material as well; Noel Van Horn is always welcome, and as prolific utility artists go, the duck side seems to lack anyone quite on the level of César Ferioli.

I want to give this book full marks, but I'm also the vindictive and disagreeable sort, so I'm subtracting points for the inexplicable fixation on those godawful "Riverside Rovers" stories.  You have only yourselves to blame!
A-

Donald Duck Adventures
Here's where it gets a bit shaky.  On the one hand, the attempt to bring the long-form digest format--ubiquitous in Europe--to the US was admirable and worthwhile.  On the other hand, let's go ahead and admit it: the stories selected evinced no discernible quality control.  Sure, there was good stuff published here, but every story was a complete crap shoot: just no way to predict whether or not it would be worthwhile--and when you hit a dud, it kinda rankled here more than it would if you were just reading a ten-pager.  And look: I know I'm starting to repeat myself here, but ferfucksake, this was the ideal format for printing some vintage Italian material.  And yet, they almost exclusively used Egmont stuff (yes, I'm sure there were justifiable economic reasons for this, but I'm just judging the finished product here).  I've read so damn many three-tiered Italian stories that were just screaming to be localized, and doing so would've upped the average quality level on this title a lot.  Just imagine: a book twice this length (ie, the standard length for these things in Europe).  A mixture of only the best Egmont and Italian stories from all eras.  THINK HOW GREAT THAT BOOK WOULD'VE BEEN!!!!!!  But nooooo!  Opportunity squandered!  Meh.

Sure, there was a fair bit of enjoyable material here.  But the gulf between potential and reality is just so vast.  As such, I'm probably judging it more harshly than it deserves, but…
C+

Mickey Mouse Adventures
What I said above more or less applies here, too, though I have the inchoate and possibly unjustifiable impression that the three-tiered mouse stories trended a bit higher-quality than the duck ones.  Also, they did publish that one Scarpa story here, and would've done more if the line persisted, so points for that.
B-

Uncle Scrooge
Well really, when you have sixty-some pages of Scrooge material, it would be hard to screw things up too badly, especially when you've got new Rosa stories and rarely-reprinted late Barks.  However, I must admit, there can be a certain samey feeling to some of these issues, which comes, I think, from an over-reliance on Egmont material.  Scrooge, when you come right down to it, is a substantially more limited character than Donald and Mickey in terms of the kind of stories you can do, and when a very large percentage of what you're printing of him comes from the same cultural context…well, you can see the problem.  I'm not saying it's a big problem, but I think the inclusion of more classic material from Disney Italia (though in fairness, they seemed to get a bit better in that regard as the line progressed), along with some judiciously-selected non-Barks Western material, would have made for a more balanced book (it would also be great to see some Brazilian material, but I know there are other issues there).
A-

Walt Disney's Comics & Stories
On the other hand, saminess is bound to be much less of a problem when you're dealing with the entire Disney cast.  I still would have preferred a more diverse array of sources, but the lack of balance isn't as noticeable.  The marquee Van Horn stories were always welcome, even if the man was getting to be a bit past his prime, and I really appreciated the occasional Gottfredson reprint, especially when it came from the rarely-reprinted Walsh era.  As for those serialized McGreal things, I think the prestige format is ideal for long-form, multi-part material like this, so cheers for that.  Anti-cheers for the fact that that "Formula One" serial is pretty bad (okay, that wasn't really a McGreal thing, but they did the English script, so I'm counting it, so there).  But pro-cheers once again for the fact that "Mythos Island" is pretty good!  And no cheers or anti-cheers for "The Orb Saga," which…is what it is.  So basically, it evens out, and we're all good.  The same caveats that I raised about Uncle Scrooge do apply here (though they DID do quite a few Western reprints, even if they were mostly of the sort-of-pleasant-but-inessential Scamp and Chip'n'Dale variety, along with the HATE HATE KILL WITH FIRE Li'l Bad Wolf variety) but they just seem less important somehow. 
A

Seasonal Specials
This would be Vacation Parade, Christmas Parade, and Spring Fever--I assume that had the line continued, they would have been joined by Autumn Adventures or something of the sort.  The interesting--or maybe not!--thing about these is that they were by far the most significant repositories for long Barks DD reprints: in addition to all the Christmas stories, there were "Too Many Pets," "Terror of the River," "Mystery of the Swamp," "Vacation Time," "Dangerous Disguise," and "Trail of the Unicorn."  I think that was an okay arrangement, actually, given how many fewer of them there are than Barks US adventures.  I just wish they'd gotten to the top items on my wish list, "Old California" and "Big-Top Bedlam" (though actually, what with the Fantagraphics books, talk of Barks reprints may be largely irrelevant in the not-too-distant future).  ANYWAY, aside from the Barks stuff, these volumes were pretty catch-as-catch-can: a few not-that-impressive Italian stories; a few largely-unimpressive things from the likes of Murry…perfectly fine, ultimately, but not necessarily things of beauty and/or joys forever.
B

One-Shots
We're talking here about shorter--ie, no longer than the regular prestige books--issues here. 

I remember well first receiving the first Barks/Rosa collection--this was early on in my Disney renaissance, and being able to read this story from my childhood plus an awesome sequel was deeee-lightful.  The whole Barks/Rosa series idea was a good one (whether they technically count as "*one*-shots" or not).  There was some other strong stuff too, like that "Somewhere in Nowhere"/"North of the Yukon" volume; also, the first and, as it turned out, only Jippes Collection, which I believe was the last thing the company ever published--woulda loved to see more of those.  The one with that allegedly "interactive" Block story (an interesting idea that would've needed to be FAR longer to really work) may not quite have been an artistic success, but it was still worthwhile overall.

Still, there was also a fair bit of blah material, like those "Three Musketeers" and "Twice Upon a Christmas" cartoon tie-ins (NB: the only reason those old Western "edutainment" things worked to the extent that they did was because they were adapted by crazy people); and those McGreal "Blotman" books (which mostly squandered a fun concept--though the fact that the company was confident enough that they felt they could release such niche products is points in their favor).  Know what would've been good?  Something along the lines of the "Atombrella and the Rhyming Man" one-shot that Boom didn't release because figuring out how to achieve the fiendishly difficult task of selling never-reprinted classic Gottfredson was just too much for their feeble brains to handle (bitter? Me?).
B

Books
Here, we are referring to longer material.  And Gemstone could certainly put on a show, I'll tell you that.  One might complain, accurately, that those two Ducktales serials they released were kinda bad, but hey, I'm okay with them; there's a certain historical importance, anyway.  And I can easily just smile and shrug off the fact of Barks stories being marketed as a Ducktales tie-in--hey, the stories are there; that's all that really matters.  And those are the only instances that are even slightly questionable: otherwise, there were those nice Disney Treasures volumes that did a very good job of encapsulating their subjects; that "Dragonlords" book (another instance of the company showing great self-confidence, and while somewhat flawed, the story's still pretty good); and, of course, the biggest gimme in all of Disney publishing, the L&T volumes (woulda loved to see the whole thing, bonus chapters interspersed appropriately throughout, published in a single high-quality hardcover, but I guess I can't complain too much).  And finally, we can't forget the company's pièce de résistance, the massive Mickey and the Gang, which I cannot praise enough--somewhat surprisingly, you can still buy it new on amazon; if you don't have a copy, I would strongly recommend obtaining one before it becomes rare and expensive.
A

Giveaways
By which we refer to both ashcan and free-comic-book-day editions.  These are released for promotional purposes, so they have to be judged as such: how likely are these to turn a non-fan's head?  I'd say as likely as anything, for the most part.  Some good longer stories in the FCBD issues, and some good shorter stuff in the ashcans.  I know *I'd* have been thrilled to receive one of the latter while trick-or-treating, had they existed when I was doing that--and as a special bonus for established fans, they even gave us an awesome exclusive Rota story.  I'm taking points off for including "The Robin Hood Adventure," though.  It has a few amusing lines, but in general, it's just not a good story, and while it's possible that I'm wildly misjudging other people, I have difficulty seeing how it was ever gonna win any converts.
A-

*Of course, I've read Wright stories otherwhere that would seem to contradict this.