Italian weekly magazine Topolino (Mickey Mouse) is celebrating its 60th birthday this week. A ‘Topolino’ title has actually been around since 1932 (Topolino Giornale), but the book format as we know it today was started in April 1949. The magazine, still loved by children and adults and found anywhere in Italy where magazines are sold, maintains its market leadership with original comic stories and themed editorials. In recent years summer specials have sometimes driven up sales of the weekly comic to over one million copies.

The 60th anniversary is celebrated in this week’s special issue (#2784). Readers can win a trip to Disneyland Paris and there’s a special website where people can vote on their favorite stories from the last 60 years. After the initial votes a list of 12 stories has been compiled, and readers can now read and vote on these 12 stories online (to view them visit the website then click on ‘vota’). Among the finalists are Romano Scarpa’s The Flying Scot (1957) and Mickey’s Inferno (1949) by Guido Martina and Angelo Bioletto. Both of these stories were published in the United States in Uncle Scrooge 315 and Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories 666 respectively.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Anniversaries, Italy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.