Topolino redirects here. For the car, see Fiat 500 "Topolino".

The Donald Duck pocket books are a series of paperback

Paperback

Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...

-sized publications published in various Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an countries, featuring Disney comics

Disney comics

Disney comics are comic books and comic strips featuring Walt Disney characters.The first Disney comics were newspaper strips appearing from 1930 on . In 1940, Western Publishing began producing Disney comic books in the United States...

.

Background

The pocket books were originally published irregularly (about 6 times a year) until 1987 and monthly since. They are roughly A5-sized (digest size

Digest size

Digest size is a magazine size, smaller than a conventional or "journal size" magazine but larger than a standard paperback book, approximately 5½ x 8¼ inches, but can also be 5⅜ x 8⅜ inches and 5½ x 7½ inches. These sizes have evolved from the printing press operation end...

) and about 250 pages thick. Each book has about eight stories, but the numbers of stories can vary widely from issue to issue. As of 2006, there were more than 300 books. Almost all stories come from European publishers - namely Mondadori

Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

Arnoldo Mondadori Editore is the biggest publishing company in Italy.-History:Founded by the 18-year-old Arnoldo Mondadori in 1907 to publish the magazine titled Luce!, it soon became an important publisher. Its headquarters are in Milan....

/Disney Italy from Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 and, more recently, Egmont from Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

.

Most of the artists are from Italy (among the most famous and internationally renowned being Romano Scarpa

Romano Scarpa

Romano Scarpa was one of the most famous Italian creators of Disney comics.-Biography:Growing up in Venice he developed a particular love for American cartoons and Disney comics, that, at the time, were published in the big format of the Topolino Giornale which was then printing now classic Floyd...

, Marco Rota

Marco Rota

Marco Rota is an Italian Disney comic artist who served as editor-in-chief of Disney Italia from 1974 to 1988.-Career:...

, Pier Lorenzo De Vita, Massimo De Vita, Giorgio Cavazzano

Giorgio Cavazzano

Giorgio Cavazzano is an Italian comic strip artist. He started his career at age 14, as an inker for Romano Scarpa...

, Giovan Battista Carpi

Giovan Battista Carpi

Giovan Battista Carpi was an Italian comics artist. He worked mainly for Disney comics, mostly on books featuring Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck, although he occasionally drew Mickey Mouse as well...

) with a minority of Danish artists (such as Flemming Andersen

Flemming Andersen

Flemming Andersen is a Danish comics artist best known for Disney comics starring Donald Duck and related characters.-Life and career:...

), and very few stories are drawn by Spanish and Argentinian artists.

Production process

Just like their larger, A4 European Disney comic counterparts and as is common with North-American superhero comics, hardly any story published in the pocket books is made by one single person, instead each story is a combined effort. An author writes a story for which the production company assigns an artist whose unique style they think most resembles the story's particular spirit, then the artist's drawings are completed, again as by management directions, first by a particular inker and then a particular colorist. These groupings can at times be only loose and variable from story to story (especially stable author-artist groupings are rare), but particular artist-inker-colorist groupings can last long enough to define what later is recognized as an artist's defined "style period". It was not until the late 1990s that the production companies began to print at least author and artist of each Disney story in their publications.

B/W vs. color

Until issue #118, a particular limitation of the pocket books out of economical reasons was that only half of the pages were printed in color, while for the other half simply the uncolored line art

Line art

Line art is any image that consists of distinct straight and curved lines placed against a background, without gradations in shade or hue to represent two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects...

 was printed. This was done in an alternating routine so that one pair of pages (left and right page) one was looking at was black and white, and turning to the next pair of pages they were in color, etc. It was not until issue #119 (spring 1987, shortly before the move to monthly issues) that the pocket books were printed in full color. In later reprints, these early issues were published in all-color.

Mini pocket books

In the late 2000s, "mini" pocket books have also appeared. These mini pocket books are smaller (A6-sized rather than A5-sized) but have slightly more pages, and consist almost exclusively of reprints of stories in previously appeared full-size pocket books, rather than all-new material.

Framework stories

A special feature of the early issues of pocket books were the so-called framework stories. In these early days, the stories used to be connected with each other by a framework story, forming a general story line throughout the entire book. For every of those early issues, the publishers mostly chose unrelated stories from a large pool, and it was only after those stories had been chosen that a fitting framework would be written, then drawn in a sub-standard quality style by artist Giuseppe Perego. As the feature gradually fell out of use, Perego was partly replaced by Giancarlo Gatti, an artist whose quality is more on par with that of the usual production level and who like Perego often publishes full-length main stories instead of only doing "filler" frameworks in between these.

The framework feature was gradually dropped during the 1980s (roughly between the issues #80-#100), as nowadays each story is usually completely independent from the other stories in the same issue.

Spine-assembly pictures

Since the same issue as full-color was introduced, the pocket books also feature pictures of Disney characters on their spines, a feature especially appealing to collectors as these pictures make it instantly apparent if an issue is missing when the pocket books are lined up on a cupboard. The first spine-assembly picture ran from 1987 until late 1991/early 1992, since then each spine picture (usually) spans a year (= 12 issues).

In different countries

The same stories, which are mostly written and drawn by Italian writers and artists, are translated into different languages and appear in each country roughly about the same time, but there are differences of one or two months between the publishing schedules of different countries. As there was no connection between issues other than the recurring cast of characters, the early issues (until about #30?) were mostly published in different order all over Europe, so the German #3 for instance is not the same as the Danish, French, or Finnish #3.

Various local names for the Donald Duck pocket books include:

• Danish
  Danish language
  Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
  
  : Jumbobog
• Estonian
  Estonian language
  Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...
  
   : Miki Hiir Koomiksikogu
• Egyptian
  Arabic language
  Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
  
   : ميكى جيب
• Finnish
  Finnish language
  Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
  
  : Aku Ankan taskukirja
• French
  French language
  French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
  
   : Mickey Parade (from issue #723bis, April 1966 to #1433bis, December 1979)
• German
  German language
  German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
  
  : Lustiges Taschenbuch (before issue #119, April 1987, the title was Walt Disneys Lustige Taschenbücher)
• Icelandic
  Icelandic language
  Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
  
  : Myndasögusyrpa/Syrpa
• Italian
  Italian language
  Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
  
  : Topolino
  Topolino
  Topolino, is an Italian digest-sized comic series featuring Disney comics. The series has had a long running history, first appearing in 1932...
  
  
• Norwegian
  Norwegian language
  Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
  
  : Donald Pocket
• Swedish
  Swedish language
  Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
  
  : Kalle Ankas Pocket
• Dutch
  Dutch language
  Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
  
  : Donald Duck Pocket
• Polish
  Polish language
  Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
  
  : Gigant Poleca (formerly Komiks Gigant)
• Russian
  Russian language
  Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
  
  : Комикс Disney since 2010

All these books started publishing in 1967 and 1968 respectively, except for the Finnish version, which started in 1970, the Polish which started in 1992, Icelandic which started in 1994 and Estonian which started in 2008. The Italian edition, published since 1949, was the inspiration for the later European editions.