Aladdin Central Messageboard

[VampireNaomi]

I was checking out when Wizards of Mickey (scroll down to see the gorgeous title pages) would be coming out in my country, and I started wondering about the state of Disney comics worldwide, especially in the States.

Europe, especially Italy, has a very healthy Disney comics industry, with hundreds of stories produced every year, but I rarely hear anything about American comics, unless they're by Don Rosa or old classics like Barks, Taliaferro, or Gottfredson. My country publishes tons of Donald/Mickey comics, but the majority of them come from Italy or the Netherlands. Are these comics even made in the States anymore? If not, do you translate the ones made elsewhere?

I'm really curious about this because I absolutely adore what Italians have done with the characters, and the film-noir Mickey Mouse series by the Danish publisher Egmont is one of the best things ever. Italians even had a more mature Mickey series that got cancelled because Disney didn't like it. Yet it seems like this is somehow a very European thing because I never hear Americans talk about these.
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[AladdinsGenie]

I believe once upon a time they use to have a ton of Disney comics (I have some Aladdin ones myself), but now the most you'll get is a quick strip in a Disney magazine, if even.

[Calluna]

Inducks! I love that site; it let me know which old issues of Disney Adventures I needed to buy.

Do you mean just with the original characters like Mickey and Donald, or are we including comics based on movie characters, too? In the 90s there were a bunch of comics based on Disney movies. From what I could see on this site it looks like Disney at first published them themselves, then later they published them through Marvel. Besides Aladdin I know there were Beauty and the Beast and Gargoyles comics; I think they might have had one with the original Disney characters as well. In 1996 all the Disney comics Marvel published got combined into one, Disney Comic Hits, and they don't make that one any more.

Anyway, back in the 90s a pretty large percentage of Disney Adventures magazine was comics, I don't know if they even still have comics in the magazine anymore (if they do it's probably just one or two). Even back in the 90s, though, some of the comics in that magazine were translations of Disney comics from Holland or Spain, so even then Disney comics weren't as big over here as they were in Europe. My guess is it's just a difference in the comic-reading audience between here and there (here we seem mostly to be into superhero comics, and Disney comics were only profitable at a time when their animated movies were insanely popular). I'm kind of jealous in a way, but then I got all the animation originally in my own language, so I shouldn't complain.

Edit: Oh, forgot to mention, there is a new Gargoyles comic out right now, but it's made by an indie comics company that bought the rights; Greg Weisman works on it.
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