When Marvel Met Disney

    Next week features one of the biggest comic book releases of the year. (Yes, I'm back with comic books for another week.  So what.) Marvel will publish its first comic book based on classic Disney characters since being bought out of bankruptcy by Disney years ago.  Sure, Marvel has published other comic books based on other Disney properties, such as the Muppets and the theme parks, but this will be the first actual comic book featuring the classic characters.  Disney has been producing movies and television shows based on Marvel characters for a long time now, so I am surprised it has taken so long to allow Marvel to publish comic books with Disney stars.  Marvel tested the waters out last year by featuring Disney characters as if they were Marvel superheroes on a number of variant covers in honor of the 100th anniversary of Disney animation studios.  This new comic will be the first Disney comic book in years.  Disney has had a long history in comic books ever since comic books have been around.  The first comics came from Dell and lasted there until the late 1960s when Dell left the comic book market.  Then, Gold Key and Whitman took over the licenses until the late 1970s/early 1980s, mostly publishing older stories instead of new ones.  Then, in the late 1980s, a new publisher called Gladstone started publishing comics, mostly older ones with a mix of newer stories originally for the European market. (There is an in joke there for those in the know.) Disney would finally start publishing their own comics in the early 1990s, focusing on the extremely popular television cartoons.  Most of these titles soon folded, leaving only the classic titles before Disney left the comics market.  Gladstone would soon get the license back in the mid-1990s before going out of business.  Other small companies would gain the license for a few years over the last decades.  Recently, Dynamite has been publishing new comics focusing on a mix of movie and television cartoon characters, while Fantagraphics has been making collections of classic material. Yet, it will be next week when Marvel produces the first new material of classic characters, starring the world's most popular Disney comic book character--Scrooge McDuck.  First, McDuck was not tagged by autocorrect, which reflects the character's popularity.  Second, huh?  For all of the readers who don't know,  Uncle Scrooge is possibly the most popular to star in Disney comics.  Scrooge was created by former Disney animator Carl Barks as a foil for Donald Duck in a Christmas story, hence the 'Scrooge' name.  The character was so popular that he kept popping up in Donald stories, eventually spinning off into his own comic, although he would still appear on occasion in the main Donald Duck comic.  Scrooge would not be seen in a Disney cartoon until "Disney's A Christmas Carol" in the late 1970s, before becoming the star of the "Duck Tales" cartoon in the 1980s. To this day, Scrooge and Donald Duck comic books sell more copies throughout Europe than the most popular titles do in America, when all of the various weekly editions in various languages are combined.  Yes, weekly.   The basic plot of the new comic is that Scrooge has to team up with his multiversal variants to stop an evil version of himself from taking over the multiverse using the ultimate amalgamation of 'Number One' dimes.  Yes, a typical Marvel comic book  plot.  Still planning on getting it though.  In one week.