I watched a Youtube video about Don Rosa (to any Americans reading: he's a famous Donald Duck artist) today, and learned that in 2023, Disney banned two of his stories from ever being published again, effectively preventing The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck from ever being reprinted.
The two banned stories both feature the character of Bombie the Zombie, who is an African voodoo zombie created by a white guy in the 1940s and you can probably infer the rest
Apparently the modern Don Rosa collections that were published already had a content warning much like the ones Disney puts in front of their old animated features and shorts that contain ~~racist~~ outdated elements but I guess that wasn't enough. Then again, the parent Walt Disney company has never given a single fuck about their comics side and treated the artists like absolute shit so this is completely on brand
Yeah, I read all this stuff as a kid, I was talking about the banned Rosa stories.
Many Barks stories are also extremely racist, even if you don't count all the ones with questionable depictions of non-white people, how many times is the trope ”these simples savages don't know anything about the modern world, let's trick them with some treats like pocket radios into giving up their riches” repeated?
There's definitely material for a leftist podcast, but since the comics have only ever been popular in some European countries and it's probably really hard to get hold of most of the comics, there's probably not that much interest in doing that.
Hard to get hold of? These comics have been reprinted again and again for decades in Europe and they litter every library, attic and used bookstore. Barks' and Rosa's stuff in particular is very easy to find scans of thanks to modern reprints and the same should go for every other big name classic Disney artist. The Italian Donald Duck/Mickey Mouse comics universe is also a fascinating rabbit hole. Those old Italian stories were wild, with Donald being a horrible lazy asshole that was always physically abusing his nephews