This was the last issue of Donald Duck Adventures published by the Walt Disney Company before the license was given back to Gladstone. (We have on good authority that the three-year exercise by Disney lost money and the license was returned for the simple reason that Gladstone was the only publisher in 20 years to successfully market the Disney comic books. As this last issue of DD Adventures clearly shows, by the end of Disney’s run their comics were clones of Gladstone’s former format, which was to immediately begin again with Series II as promoted in a double-page, full-color ad in this issue.)
On the letters page, editor David Seidman notes that Gladstone had published 20 issues previously of Donald Duck Adventures and we were going to pick up at that point, with #21 (rather than continuing Disney’s independent numbering, which we’re sure has confused some new fans in recent years).
As promoted within, “ AN ALL-NEW adventure by fan favorite, William Van Horn, where Donald Duck gets hold of a gun that can shrink or enlarge anything.” Though I never saw the movies, that reminds me somewhat of Touchstone’s “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” or the follow-up, “Honey, I Blew Up the Kids.” And following that -- in somewhat typical Gladstone fashion -- there are four Carl Barks one-pagers followed by the Old Duck Man’s ten-pager, “Have Gun, Will Dance” (from Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #278, November 1963).
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