It’s official: Classic Disney comics return to the United States

Posted on June 19th 2009 in Publishers, United States

Boom Studios logo I just returned from a rather disappointing trip (we drove to Florida to see a space shuttle launch that was canceled) and came home to some awesome news that has me all cheered up again. According to reports on comiXtreme and Bleeding Cool there’s an ad in the latest Previews catalog from Diamond Distribution for new Disney comics by Boom! Studios!

This confirms last month’s rumor and it means that Disney comics starring classic characters, including Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and the gang, will soon return to the United States. The news comes just months after it became clear that Gemstone Publishing, who ran Disney comic titles from 2003 till the end of 2008, lost its license due to financial problems. The quick turn-around on this is impressive, especially in these economically tough times. Negotiations with Disney Publishing Worldwide must have gone very well for them to win the license this quickly. Last time it took several years for a new publisher to pick up the license (Gladstone’s run ended in 1999 and Gemstone started in 2003).

Boom! Studios already had the license to publish comics based on characters from Disney/Pixar’s animated feature films. The first issues of Cars and The Incredibles, featuring original new stories, came out in March and quickly sold out. Now Boom! Studios can add a whole range of new titles to their line-up. The first new issues to be released in September are Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories #699 and Mickey Mouse & Friends #296, but more titles will be announced in the coming months.

Boom! is continuing Gemstone’s numbering of these established titles, but its format will be totally different.

Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories was turned into a ‘prestige format’ by Gladstone in 1995 and has remained that way since: high quality books with classic reprints and hard-to-find stories mainly targeted at collectors. As a long-time collector of Disney comics I loved this kind of stuff, but one could argue whether this format has any means of real success in a market with a limited number of Disney comic fans like myself. And most importantly, Gemstone’s issues of WDC&S sold for $7.99 and was only available by subscription, in specialized comic book stores and online. The famous series started in 1940 and was once the best selling comic book in the United States, with a monthly circulation of over three million copies in the 1950s, but those issues were 10 or 12 cents a piece and were targeted at kids, not collectors (sure there has been inflation since then, but 10 cents in 1955 had about the same buying power as 80 cents today, so relatively speaking those comics were way cheaper back then).

It looks like Boom! is completely abandoning the collector’s concept and going a different route. The first new issue of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories will have only 24 pages and will sell for $2.99, the same price and size as its Pixar titles. And that’s not all, it will have the first part of an Italian-produced multi-part series titled Ultraheroes. These three-tier stories (stories with three rows are usually used in smaller pocket-sized books, while full-sized comics have four rows) aren’t anything like the material that has been published in WDC&S in recent years. Ultraheroes is a series with a total of 240 pages, so it looks like this is going to be the new style of WDC&S for at least its first 10 issues. You can download all chapters of Ultraheroes in Italian from Disney.it.

A similar series, also created in Italy, is being planned for the first issues of Mickey Mouse & Friends, namely the 266-page multi-part series Wizards of Mickey, which first ran in Italian weekly Topolino in October 2006. This too is a 10-part series, but at only 24 pages in each Boom! issue this will likely extend beyond 10 months. You can also download these stories in Italian from wizardsofmickey.com (go to WoM and then Gli episodi).

I’m a bit surprised at the choice of Ultraheroes for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories and would have personally found this more appropriate in the Donald Duck & Friends series, but I am still very excited about this relaunch and can’t wait to see how it works out.

I am especially curious to see how Boom! plans to distribute these new Disney comics for kids. A criticism often heard about Gemstone was that their comics were not easily available. Disney comics in Italy like weekly Topolino for which stories like Ultraheroes and Wizards of Mickey were made, are immensely popular (although those two stories are actually considered not to be so good), but then again you can buy Topolino and dozens of other Disney titles at almost every street corner. Will Boom! finally manage to get their comics into regular stores in the US? I hope so!

Then there’s the number of pages. 24 pages is very low. I own many Disney comics from around the world and not many are as thin as 24 pages. I have the first issues of Boom’s The Incredibles and Cars here and they look and feel very thin indeed. If you consider the letters column and ads then there are not many pages left for comics. Once again if you look at Topolino in Italy, these weekly comics have 180 pages and sell for €2.20. That is 30 times more pages per month and roughly 7 times more pages for the same price. It is too bad the American market is so different.

Here’s a full description of the next two issues:

WALT DISNEY’S COMICS & STORIES #699
(W) Riccardo Secchi (A) Stefano Turconi
One of the longest-lived, greatest comics in history comes to BOOM! Studios! A direct market event — the title that was host to Walt Disney’s most cherished characters that helped build a decades-spanning global empire, originally launched in 1942, has come to BOOM! Kids! Ever wondered what would happen when all the superheroes of the Disney comics universe star in an epic clash against all the super villains with the fate of the world at stake? Join The Duck Avenger, Super Goofy, and the man himself Mickey Mouse for an all-new team of heroes, an all-new era in Disney publishing! (C: 0-0-1)
24pgs, FC SRP: $2.99

MICKEY MOUSE & FRIENDS #296
(W) Stefano Ambrosio (A) Lorenzo Pastrovicchio
First BOOM! Kids issue! One of the longest-lived, most-successful comic book series in the industry’s history comes to BOOM! and brings a little magic — presenting Wizards of Mickey! Student of the great wizard Grandalf, Mickey Mouse hails from the humble village of Miceland. Allying himself with Donald Duck and his pet dragon named Fafnir, and team mate Goofy, Mickey’s come to the great tournament to get his revenge on Peg Leg Pete, who has stolen the Rain Crystal from Miceland! Join Mickey Mouse and his friends on an epic tale of magic and wonder! (C: 0-0-1)
SC, 24pgs, FC SRP: $2.99

(via DCF)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Publishers, United States. 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.

Comments

Jun 20, 2009
8:42 am

#1 JeffConn wrote:

I am looking forward to getting these new issues. And i approve of the radical change in content. After all, the Gladstone/Gemstone version of Disney comics were going nowhere, circulation-wise. As for the price, with the few copies that any American comic sells, I can’t see it being truly cheap anymore.

Jun 20, 2009
9:51 am

#2 Laz wrote:

Really very sorry to hear this. You might think that nothing could be worse for Disney comics in the US than not being published at all. But it’s not true, there’s something even worse than that. And that is publishing Wizards of Mickey, the story that is unanimously considered the lowest point ever touched by Disney comics (wonderful drawings, though… painfully wasted for a ridicolous and insulting script). I bought every single comic book published by Gemstone, even the bad ones, to support them. But don’t count on my support for this.

Jun 20, 2009
5:42 pm

#3 Torsten Adair wrote:

Interesting. I’m excited about this, as BOOM! has done a great job with all of their titles.

I think that fans of any series (Ducks, Star Wars) tend to forget the origins of series they discovered as kids. Yes, Disney comics have aspects which appeal to adults, but the primary market is children.

Disney rights are cheap… BOOM! could migrate these two series to graphic novels. Bookstores and libraries are more welcoming markets than comics shops. BOOM! could also replicate the European model and publish collections to appeal to the adult collector, while keeping the comics for kids (and collectors who want them).

Having read Disney comics since the 1970s, I think the end days of Western/Gold Key are probably the worst. Blah off-model artwork, trite boring stories… Also, if the two European series were so awful, why did they last so long?

Jun 20, 2009
8:17 pm

#4 Roger North wrote:

I would like to buy both of these issues if they sell them in stores. I hope they make more titles featuring classic Disney Characters.

Jun 22, 2009
6:53 pm

#5 Jay wrote:

I wonder what this means for reprints of classic Disney comics, I was pretty bummed when Gemstone cancelled the Floyd Gottfredson and Carl Barks libraries last year.

Jun 24, 2009
8:41 pm

#6 John Asperger wrote:

…As far as 10c in Truman’s last term versus $2.99 to-day goes , I have seen the argument made that , when comic books , in the early 1950s or thereabout , could not support being 48 pages long anymore , they cut down toeards the eventual 32-page standard in order to keep at the magic 10c and that that started a pattern of cut-cut-cutting to keep at 10c into the early 60s , and then , when they could do that no more , still making the price rises as penny-ante as possible by cutting the production quality , creators’ rates , etc. and increasing the amount of ads…Until by the late 70s they could simply do that no more .
I won’t argue that there wasn’t any over-reaction in the other direction especially around the ” boom ” for comics very late 80s and early 90s , but that’s one of the reasons for the comics shop era’svastroportionate rise in the price of standard ” funnybooks ” , from the 50s through the 70s , ey followed a ” penny-ante ” approach that eventually , for one , cut the return to the retailer to such a tiny amount that , well…
I remember an early 1980s article about the thenstarting comics-shop boom that quoted an old-timer at DC saying this , that ” Looking back , the mistake we made was in the early 50s “…( Sol Harrison , possibly?? )

Jul 16, 2009
12:48 pm

#7 Rob Y wrote:

I can’t believe it–I’ve been wondering what happened to my Uncle Scrooge subscription, and why the comic albums (like the Don Rosa Collection and the Carl Barks Collections that were supposed to be released) kept getting delayed. Now my worst fears are confirmed–not only has Gemstone gone belly-up (and I was never informed by the company), but a new company is taking over with plans to “re-vitalize” the Disney comics–or in other words, take out what made them good in favor of increased popularity (or so it seems).

*Sigh* If only Gemstone had lasted long enough to make the Don Rosa & Carl Barks collections, I was so excited about those.

Now it remains to be seen whether Disney comics will even be worth collecting anymore. 🙁