THEDISFIGURATIONS

What you will see on this page would have been news to Carl Barks himself if he had lived to see it!!! It deals with the disfiguring changes that were made to Barks' stories outside the USA. During his life Barks occasionally saw his stories tampered with for different reasons. Most of the changes were made because Western needed space for their advertisements and then Barks' - and other artists' - stories had to suffer. And sometimes particular panels were censored for various reasons and changes had to be made.

But abroad Barks' stories sometimes underwent far more extensive changes. These were also caused by many other factors and a few of them are described on this page. Denmark has been chosen as an example of what could happen to Barks' stories abroad, but it should be emphasized that Egmont - which has been the Danish publisher all through the years - by no means stands alone.

GENERAL EDITINGS

Anders And & Co.
The first issue - from 1949

At first and for many years later, Denmark only had one Disney magazine which was called Anders And & Co. (AA). This meant that the different Disney stories had to be crammed into the 36 pages available. This caused a variety of problems in order to fit the stories into the available space.

Some of Barks' 10-pagers were actually cut in half, and many of the adventure stories had panels - or whole pages - removed. Furthermore, his adventure stories typically took up more than 30 pages, so they had to be spread out in three issues. This also meant that at least one panel had to be cut in issue numbers 2 and 3 to make room for a summary.

Along the way Egmont published a number of other Disney magazines in which Barks' stories received full justice. They were published in their original format - with no pages missing.

AMERICAN SPECIALTIES

In the early years many American traditions were fairly unknown outside the USA, which caused Egmont to change some of Barks' front covers in order to make them understandable.

WDCS290

AA13/1976

U$09

AA15/1976

FC1267

AA39/1962

WDCS157

AA22/1957

U$41	AA48/1963
The football arena became a soccer stadium

WDCS152	AA08/1953
The Thanksgiving Turkey became a Horn of Plenty

ALTERATIONS

Below are shown a few examples where Barks' drawings were changed for unknown reasons.

U$56	AA39/1967
Ghost of the Railroad Town. Front cover: Ghosts became crows

WDCS212	AA05/1959
Front cover: Paint roller became a brush

U$34	AA28/1962
Mythic Mystery: 4 horses became 2 goats

WDCS089	AA08/1955
Snowman and winter became a soapbox car and summer

MUTILATIONS

Sometimes the material that Egmont received from USA was of very poor quality and Egmont tried to make up for it by hiring other artists to redraw some of Barks' stories.

WDCS132*)

AA41/1970

WDCS108

AA02/1950

U$09

AA04/1957

U$10

AA02/1957

LOCATIONS

When Barks wrote his stories he would use a variety of real and invented locations all over the world. But in Denmark the names of the real locations were almost always changed into fictitious names.

FC0422	AA40/1972
It will forever be a mystery why the Danes were not allowed to read about Norway in U$09 The Lemming with the Locket, or Australia in FC0159 Adventure Down Under. They were changed to Osteland (Cheeseland) and Kaengunesien (Kangoroostan). Furthermore, British Guyana in FC0422 The Gilded Man became Bocombia!

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FC0256	SH2b
In the Danish version of FC0256 Luck of the North Egmont decided to have the story unfold in Greenland instead of Alaska! Although Greenland was a full part of the Danish realm at the time it doesn't explain this strange decision. It also meant that some of the panels had to be altered as no firs grow in Greenland...