Gladstone
Country: United States
About Gladstone
In 1986 Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran, Disney fans who had previously published hardback collections of Carl Barks comics and paintings, began to publish the comics themselves under the Gladstone label. Edited by Byron Erickson, the magazines began to give American exposure to European artists like Daan Jippes, Ben Verhagen, Victor Rios, and Daniel Branca as well as reprinting the work of Barks, Gottfredson (for the first time in decades), and Murry. With the advent of Don Rosa - a new artist/writer whose work, published beginning in 1987, picked up quite a head of steam - and the writer-artist team of John Lustig and William Van Horn, American Disney comics were making an excellent comeback. Floyd Gottfredson's Eega Beeva, a character of later newspaper strips whose appearances were never reprinted by Western, first appeared in American comic books at this time.
Then the Walt Disney Company itself decided that what Gladstone could do, Disney could do better. In 1990, Disney revoked Gladstone's license and assembled a mixture of talent from Marvel, Western, and Gladstone to produce new comics under the Disney Comics label. In 1993 Gladstone regained it's license. In the last three years, where Gladstone had continued publishing it's Carl Barks Library in Color albums, Cochran and Erickson had departed (the latter for Europe and Egmont). Bruce Hamilton made the decision that each of Gladstone's now-bimonthly comics was to have a relatively strict format.
In 1998, Gladstone decided to cut down it's range of titles even more. From the second quarter of that year, the only regular monthly titles that are left are Walt Disney Comics & Stories and Uncle Scrooge. They're both printed as extremely high quality collector's books featuring a wide range of stories and articles. Unfortunately, the high price of $6.95 make the average sales on the low side.
Used comic books from Gladstone are also often sold on eBay.com and you may be able to find used ones at specialized comic book stores around the world.