Byron Erickson has been deeply involved in the reprinting and creation of Disney Comics for many years. He read this post here and then sent me this…
This is in response to your "Ask Me: Licensed Comic Libraries" column on Monday. I know nothing about most comics publishers' practices in maintaining archives, but I do know a lot about how Disney handled their comic book archives worldwide. This is probably more than you want to know, so feel free to cut as needed (or desired) or paraphrase mightily if you post any of it.
As the production manager for Another Rainbow's Carl Barks Library in the 1980s, and then editor-in-grief of Gladstone's comic books, it was my job to source printable "proofs" for both the Barks reprints and Dutch and Danish created original material.
That should have been easy, because — and it may come as a news flash — Disney's license required all publishers to send proof copies of all their created material to the Disney Studio in Burbank. For free. Disney would then make available all that material to any Disney licensee that requested it. Not for free. I'm sorry, but I don't remember what they cost, but it would have been just a few dollars per page.
Unfortunately, as we soon discovered, Disney didn't provide actual photostats. Instead, they sent what can only be described as old-fashioned xerox copies (for your younger readers, that's copies on coated paper where the blacks weren't really black). Some of them required lots of touch-ups by our talented production artists who had to meticulously compare the copies to the original published comics to reinstate small pieces of lines that had faded out or were missing.
Luckily, Disney's archives was missing some stories and almost all of the Barks covers. I say "luckily" because that meant Disney was forced to order the missing material directly from Western Publishing's archive in Racine, Wisconsin, and Western sent incredibly high-quality photostats. Again, I don't remember what they cost, but it was at least triple the cost per page of Disney's xeroxes.
Now, Bruce Hamilton (Another Rainbow and Gladstone's publisher) was not a spendthrift in any sense of the word, but he immediately realized that to make a high-quality "Barks Library" we needed to get *all* our proofs directly from Western. He got a bit of pushback on that from Disney, but they finally relented and Bruce and I flew out to Western's office in Racine to arrange the deal.
I could fill pages with stories of what an amazing treasure trove Western's archives were back then (and the very nice Vice President there who let us wander around and poke in the archives unsupervised), but the deal was made, even though said Vice President questioned Western's continuing obligation to fulfill the terms of a Disney comics license they no longer had.
Cut to my years working in Denmark for Egmont's Disney comics production. The same licensing terms applied to all the European (and Brazilian) Disney comics producers: all had to provide archival copies of all Disney comics material to Burbank for free. However, unlike in the U.S., each publisher was free to order directly from any other publisher, and the material had to be provided "at cost." The price of "at cost" was fixed at $30 per page for color separated film (no one ordered black and white proofs). This price never changed while I was with Egmont, even though at some point in the early 2000s the material started to be supplied digitally.
Finally, I know the "foreign" publishers' mutual agreement is still in force and functioning, but I'm not sure that the modern Disney corporation still maintains its archive in Burbank. During my time visiting it in the 1980s, it went from a large air-conditioned office on the Studio lot, to a series of hot trailers parked way in the back. And I've heard (but can't vouch for) rumors that it's been completely cleared out. Maybe that's because everything is digital now, but also maybe it's because the modern Disney Corporation doesn't care about their non-film heritage anymore. After all, the comics are no longer the cash cow they once were when Walt Disney's Comics & Stories sold more then five million copies a month in the early 1950s, and the various European Disney publishers combined through the early 2000s sold almost that many millions per week.
Well, there you are: The corporate mindset that since there's no money right this minute in preserving something that may be of value in the future, we don't want to spend money on it now. I could fill this blog for years with horror stories that have been told to me from folks who are charged with selling old movies and TV shows for home video and streaming. One told me once that the answer to the question "Why isn't this old TV series being rerun or sold on DVD?" is too often because they can't find decent prints and maybe that someone is reticent to invest in restoration of what they do have.
When I was involved in Disney comics in the seventies, they had a library of good stats and negatives. I'm sorry that seems to no longer be the case but it's not uncommon. Most folks would not believe what we had to go through to reprint the early years of Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip. Now that we're into the later years, it's much easier but there are still occasional problems finding a good copy of a certain strip.