Pencil Users: Euro-Disney

One of my favourite pencil blogs is Bleitstift: regular commentary from a German pencil and stationery lover living in Britain. I’ve learned a lot reading his posting history and one thing I love seeing is his occasional posts on European Disney illustrators.

As I’m a big fan and collector of European stationery (and languages), it probably surprises no one that I’m also a lover of European comics. Most new Disney content today comes not from America, but from Europe - specifically from Italy (Topolino), Denmark (Anders And) and the Netherlands (Donald Duck). As with scraping European boutique web sites to find gems unavailable here in America’s hat, I often scour the sites of European Disney publishers to find a way to subscribe to their publications.

It’s a quite expensive habit of mine and I do not recommend it. But for language geeks like me, it’s a great way to have some practice in my target tongues, in simple speech intended for children, and also get lots of current exposure to culture. It’s also wild to see the variances week by week in the different national editions of the same book.

As one of my big language loves is Swedish, Kalle Anka is a series I’ve been receiving for more than two years now (despite several COVID-related delivery gaps). It is an exact duplicate of the Danish edition, except in a few specific areas, such as activities for kids, and the occasional illustrated celebrity.

I also subscribed to the German edition for a couple years, which is also derived from the Danish parent, but published biweekly rather than weekly, and as such contains a slight variance in the pieces selected.

I have not tried too hard to crack Icelandic, but with the Swedish I know and all the Pagan books I read, I can wing it, plus it’s another derivative of the Danish edition, but this one half the size each week, and consequently scaled down in the number and selection of stories. All of these Danish derivatives (including the Norwegian - also the publishers of various Sami editions) are published by Egmont. Egmont also does Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian editions, none of them weekly, and thus widely different in content. I subscribe to the Estonian one, but have not really tried cracking it as a language yet.

The second big source of Euro-Disney content is from the Netherlands, which published the creatively-named Donald Duck each week. Unlike the aforementioned Danish derivatives, this edition is consistently separate material by a largely separate slate of creators. It features a somewhat wider universe of characters, recalling those from Disney classics such as Madam Mim, Lady and the Tramp, and Song of the South, often weirdly mixing in some incestuous Toon Town. Published by DPG (formerly Sanoma), Donald’s toxic main squeeze Katrien has her own monthly complete with lots of pink and girl power and makeup. I’ve been subscribed to these for a few months and find Dutch fairly easy to read as it is so close to both English and German.

The Dutch editions are vaguely related to the Aku Ankka editions put out in Finland by Sanoma (now owned by DPG but still operating under the old name in Finland). Like Estonian, I subscribe to this one but it’s a maddeningly difficult language that I have hardly broken the surface of. If I get slightly mental with German’s 4 cases, you can understand why I start involuntarily retching at Finnish’s 15. Regardless, Finland’s edition contains a solid weekly helping of new content from the Netherlands and last season’s reruns from Denmark.

The third and final big source of new Euro-Disney content is Topolino in Italy. I don’t currently have this one crossing the Atlantic for me every week but its derivatives make regular appearances throughout the Duck universe. Topolino was the primary source of content from the recently-demised US run of Disney titles from IDW. Its creators have a slightly different character style that is very easy to discern from their northern cousins. Someday soon I may try to add this little pocket-sized darling to my weekly mailbox surprises.

A final handful of publications I get are “classics” editions that collect stories from other publications and from long ago. From Sweden I get Musse Pigg, which is mostly a collection of Mickey and Donald detective one-pagers from the past 10-odd years. From Germany I get Die Tollsten Geschichten von Donald Duck, with a variety of stories from around space and time. From Estonia we have Koomiksikogu, which mostly reprints the Italian stories and old Carl Barks stuff from the US. From France I get Picsou Magazine, which has a large section of magazine articles featuring the latest in French culture (and reminding me why Québec is so broadly different a Francophone country), as well as lots of very long classics (at 300+ bimonthly pages, it has room for them).

So there you have it. Easily my most expensive hobby, just edging out vinyl and graphite. An analog art form that injects humour and pop culture into my life from Europe every week, made by pencil-wielding souls often spotted in the pages of other pencil geeks like myself.

Copyright notice (aka: don’t sue me, Disney): I don’t own any images in this post but believe they are permitted under the “fair dealing” regulations of Canada’s Copyright Act.