Walt Disney Comics Digest #52: Into the Archive

Yesterday (September 15^th) I returned from my doctor’s appointment to find that Walt Disney Comics Digest #52 (April 1975) had arrived, and sooner than I had expected. I eagerly brought it in and started to unwrap it, only to find it packaged more securely than a miser’s penny. As I finally, carefully, removed the last layer of wrapping, I began to notice a few odd anomalies.

A slight scuff on the cover drew my attention to the fact that it bore the Whitman impress rather than the more familiar Gold Key logo, as is shown in the picture here that I snagged off the internet. Now Gold Key is simply another division of Whitman, but it made me wonder what had gone on. Flipping it open, I also found that the inside covers were blank, without any of the advertising usually found there. Otherwise, the issue was still 128 pages for 69 cents, as was normal for the run at this time.

Inside, quite a lot is taken up with the Zorro story, a ‘live action-adventure type tale’ of the sort I never particularly cared for in the comics. I didn’t find the cartoon stories all that engaging either, but that could simply be because I’m a nearly 60-year-old grouch with no sentimental memories attached to them.

Super-Goof battles a scientific villain who steals his super-goobers; Donald tries to start a fix-it shop; Chip and Dale help Gramma Duck battle a thieving Pete; and Bucky Bug and the citizens of Junkville dealing with a sudden deep snow and an invasion of ants are among the better tales. There seems to be a drop in the graphic quality overall, not terrible but a noticeable simplification of the grade.

This acquisition leaves me with only five more issues to get to complete the entire run. Most of them are in the fifties, like #52 here. I hope they are of a better quality than this moderately bland offering, or it may leave the completion of the quest with a rather bitter-sweet tang in the feelings.

The Back Cover.

Walt Disney Comics Digests #51 - #57

 

                     Walt Disney Comics Digest #51 (January 1975)

Walt Disney Comics Digest #52 (April 1975)

Walt Disney Comics Digest #53 (June 1975)

                    Walt Disney Comics Digest #54 (August 1975)

                      Walt Disney Comics Digest #55 (October 1975)

                   Walt Disney Comics Digest #56 (December 1975)

Walt Disney Comics Digest #57 (February 1976)

I don’t remember seeing any of these issues back in the day; perhaps Baenziger’s, our usual supplier, no longer carried them; perhaps we simply averted our eyes because we could no longer expect such treats because we were growing up or getting poorer; it is even possible that our growing critical faculties may even have perceived the diminishment of an element of quality and decided to let them go by. All I know was that in those years I started middle school and life was suddenly about much wider things. A certain kind of innocence was left behind. A certain kind of wisdom was painfully begun.

As I say, we never had these issues at the time, and I only have two today (#54 and #57). What we can divine of most of their contents must be observed from their covers. But I think some attention must be paid to #57, this “Special Issue”, as the last in the series, and one that I do have.

It is labelled on the cover ‘A Year’s Supply of Fun’, perhaps because they knew there would be no more new Digests that year. The stories within are titled after the months themselves, going from “January Jimjams” to “December Dunking”. There is quite a lot of themed games, articles, and activities for each month, and much more about the astrological signs of each month than I would have expected (but this was the Seventies), and it ends with a calendar for the year 1976 (which was, of course, the Bicentennial year). Perhaps most significant for me is that it reprints ‘Bubble Trouble’, a little activity featuring Donald Duck that had appeared all the way back in Issue #1, thus bringing it all full circle.

That was the end of the Walt Disney Comics Digest original run. “If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred…” But in December of 1986 (only ten years later, but it seemed an eternity to me) Gladstone Comics began publishing, of the same dimensions but at a slim 96 pages per issue, a new run of Walt Disney Comics Digest, along with three other digests featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge, a new volume published every two weeks! But that is a tale for another time …