Monday 22 November 2010

GERMAN ILLUSTRATED STORY BOOKLET ADAPTATION OF BIG BAD WOLF COMICS


As a kid, I was especially delighted to see this Big Bad Wolf booklet, among other Disney booklets from the same series, in an Istanbul bookshop selling foreign books and had immediately bought them (or had my parents buy for me!) even though I couldn't read German... That was probably sometime in the mid-1970s. Now, I have discovered that it was derived from an American comics, published in no. 394 (dated July 1973) of Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, with art by Phil DeLara. Below are scans of the whole book and the comics it was derived from:










The no. 10 of Pestalozzi-Verlag's 'Walt Disney's Micky Maus Buch' series features the Three Little Pigs and is titled Die 3 kleinen Schweinchen und der böse Wolf (first published in 1965), but I don't have that one. No. 19, titled Der kleine Wolf, features the Li'l Wolf, but the Big Bad Wolf doesn't appear. On the other had, he makes a small appearance in no. 21 titled Daniel Düsentrieb from 1967, featuring Gyro Gearloose.
Pestalozzi-Verlag had started its 'Walt Disney's Micky Maus Buch' series in 1964, taking over from Bluchert Verlag's series with the identical series title and format from circa 1961-62. The initial books from Pestolazzi were reprints from Bluchert, but eventually they added new entries, such as this one. Not all stories in the series are derived from comics, some are German editions of US illustrated story books from the 1950s and most are of (yet-)unidentified origin. The series also had a British edition in the 1960s by Purnell and a French edition in the same decade by Hachette ("mini livre" series). The Turkish edition by Arkın Kitabevi from 1966-67 was of a larger and taller format than all the rest, some of the stories were also serialized in Arkın's short-lived Renkli Miki weekly comics magazine from 1966.

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