With All Your Disney Favorites

Sometime in 1968 (in June, or the months thereafter) our parents bought us a copy of Walt Disney Comics Digest (#1), put out by Gold Key Comics, featuring reprints from regular comic books in a more compact digest form, this issue containing 192 pages. Mike would have been about 6, me 5, and John 3, and Kenny, if he had even been born yet, just a baby. It might even have been bought to keep us distracted during Mom’s time in the hospital.

          Anyway, our engagement with it was intense, even if we could barely read it. Mostly, I think, it had been read to us once or twice and then we had to rely on our memories and vivid imaginations to fill out the stories. Donald, Scrooge, and the nephews visit Atlantis; Brer Rabbit gets Brer Bear to dig him a well; Daisy goes to work in Ragbagia where patches replace money; Super Goof foils an invasion from space of Goofy look-alikes stealing Earth’s rocket ships; the first half of an adaptation of “Mickey and the Beanstalk” sees Donald driven mad by the prospect of more beans for supper; these were the stories and images that sank deepest into my memories.

          And there for a long time they had to stay. As youngsters, we took very little care of our books. We read them so hard that eventually the covers would go, then pages from the front and back, then at some point Mom would just throw them out. My impression is that by my year in 2^nd Grade (1971-72) the book was entirely gone. Although we got other issues of Walt Disney Comics Digest (and they too would suffer through the years to a greater or lesser degree) this one survived only in our thoughts.

Fast forward to the early years of the 21^st Century. Suddenly I had a computer and access to eBay, and many things seemed possible that had before been unthinkable. And like many folks of my generation, I wanted to buy back the relics of my childhood. I found an affordable copy of Walt Disney Comics Digest #1, not pristine to be sure, but in acceptable shape and in my price range. Soon I gazed once more on images unseen by me for decades, of one of the nephews pouring the contents of a pie down somebody’s pants, of Brer Bear standing in the cutaway of a well, of Scrooge diving through a puzzle of seaweed to a sunken treasure, of Donald screeching out his hatred of beans, and so much more.

That was the beginning of a quest, a quest to get new copies of Disney Digests from our past, including ones I had never seen, to get the entire run (which ended in 1976), if possible. That has not, for various reasons, been accomplished yet, though I have a majority of the issues. More on them later, perhaps.