Walt Disney Comics Digest #16: The Digest Supreme

 

Walt Disney Comics Digest #16 (October 1969)

“Between June of 1968 and February of 1976, the Western Publishing Company, Inc. produced 57 issues of the Walt Disney Comics Digest magazine. Basically, they were reprints of stories from comic books in handy digest form (not unlike Reader's Digest, but for kids). When we were very young, our Mom would buy us issues now and then (I was surprised to find in retrospect we actually had Issue #1 once upon a time). In October of 1969 we picked up #16, that featured the Carl Barks comic adaptation of the animated feature "Trick or Treat". This is the last panel, and it always impressed me deeply, especially the grey/purple sky retreating before the morning.

"It is this panel I hunted down for years. I almost wept when I found the story reprinted in the giant Abbeville Press Walt Disney Donald Duck and His Nephews, and found it printed in harsh flat colors on slick paper. It in no way reproduced the soft, crumbling, subtle effects of the old newsprint; even the accuracy of the coloring (you can see in the picture above the colors are slightly out of line) didn't make up for it. At last, this July when I went hunting for Digests on eBay (I ended up with 35 of the 57) I tracked it down.

"The importance of the Disney Digests to me as a kid are hard to explain. They were studied so intensely even before I knew how to read that they assumed a sort of hallucinogenic reality for me. Some panels I thought the characters were looking out of like windows. As I read recovered copies now, phrases once so familiar, not thought of for 35 years, began to jingle through the dusty corridors of my mind ("The jig is up! It's jail for you, you dirty pup!"--from the Bucky Bug stories, always written in rhyme). Two-part stories we never saw the beginning or end of were completed at long last as I acquired new copies." (- Power of Babel, October 2008, almost 14 years ago now!)

The main story, “Trick or Treat”, starring Donald, the Nephews, and Witch Hazel, was the origin for a very popular childhood game. One of us would hang from a particular limb on our ash tree in the back yard (just the right height) and another would come running from behind to push or butt him, yelling “Whiskers from ye Billy Goat!” The object was to see how long you could hang on and how high you could be pushed. If you fell off, the “Billy Goat” won.

There was a mostly-prose story of Mickey and Goofy visiting a haunted house in “Spooky Tenants”, a most appropriate tale for an October issue. They solve their specter problems by sending them off to live in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion (yes, it was basically an ad for the newly opened attraction). The ghosts, while cartoony, were still rather eerie in my eyes.

 It is also a very bug-heavy issue. Bucky Bug builds an amusement park out of human trash in “The Playground Plot”, and Jiminy Cricket interacts with his insect brethren to build a railroad in “Toy Train Trickery”. These were almost certainly a heavy strengthening of my enjoyment of ‘little adventures’ down at the level of bugs and mice.

 When I think of Walt Disney Comics Digest, this is the book that first pops into my head. The edition came out just in time. A year or so later we would never have been allowed anything Halloween themed, and indeed it is possible our old copy was purged when Mom had us join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But nothing could erase our memories of it as we sighed for the fleshpots of Egypt.