Donald Duck #21/1955
Donald Duck #21/1955, published by De Geïllustreerde Pers, falls squarely within the most formative stretch of the Dutch weekly's early run — the first years in which the magazine was published entirely in full colour (a milestone reached with issue #10/1954) and in which Hungarian-Dutch illustrator Endre Lukács was simultaneously shaping the visual identity of the book through its covers and beginning, from 1955 onward, to draw interior stories featuring Midas Wolf and his son Wolfje. The issue represents the weekly at the precise cultural moment when it was transitioning from a vehicle for reprinting American Carl Barks material into a publication that was acquiring a distinctly Dutch personality — local cover art, locally written wolf stories, and a readership that would make it the most-read comics magazine in the Netherlands for generations. The array of characters indexed — Donald, Katrien, Kwik/Kwek/Kwak, Goofy, Midas Wolf, Wolfje, the three little pigs (Knir, Knar, Knor), and the Br'er Rabbit supporting cast (Rein Vos, Bruin Beer) — reflects the full breadth of Disney's mid-1950s stable as it was assembled for Dutch readers, making the issue a representative snapshot of that transitional editorial era.
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The Dutch Donald Duck weekly was launched on 25 October 1952 by De Geïllustreerde Pers, initially distributed free to subscribers of the women's magazine Margriet and inspired by the Scandinavian Disney weeklies that had preceded it. In its early years the magazine ran exclusively translated American material, but by 1953–1955 Endre Lukács — a Budapest-born illustrator working in the Netherlands — had become the regular cover artist and was also being commissioned to produce interior stories whenever suitable American source material ran short. It was specifically in 1955 that Lukács began drawing the Midas Wolf / Grote Boze Wolf short stories for the interior pages, with scripts written by staff including the newly arrived editor John Bakkenhoven; this production context places issue #21/1955 at the very beginning of that in-house creative programme.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by De Geïllustreerde Pers, the original Dutch publisher of the Donald Duck weekly, which launched the title on 25 October 1952.
- Issue falls in the 1955 run — the first full year in which every issue of the magazine appeared entirely in colour, a format shift introduced with issue #10/1954.
- Hungarian-Dutch artist Endre Lukács, the magazine's first and defining cover artist from 1953, began drawing Midas Wolf interior stories in 1955 — the same year this issue was published — marking a significant expansion of locally produced content.
- Scripts for the new Midas Wolf stories were written by editorial staff including John Bakkenhoven, who had recently joined De Geïllustreerde Pers from rival publisher De Spaarnestad.
- Midas Wolf (Grote Boze Wolf) and his son Wolfje had appeared in the very first issue of the Dutch weekly in October 1952; by 1955 their strip was becoming a regular, locally-produced feature rather than imported American material.
- The three little pigs known in Dutch as Knir, Knar, and Knor are Midas Wolf's perpetual quarry in these stories — he endlessly schemes to catch and eat them, always thwarted by Wolfje or by the pigs' own quick thinking.
- Supporting Disney characters Rein Vos (Br'er Fox) and Bruin Beer (Br'er Bear) appear in this issue; in the Dutch weekly they became recurring members of what stories describe as the 'Booswichtenclub' (Villains' Club), a local narrative invention.
- The magazine ran 24 pages per issue at this point in its history; the expansion to 32 pages did not occur until issue #40/1958.