Production in Denmark (Gutenberghus / Egmont)

General information

At first, Egmont's original material was made whenever the situation warranted it, but without any real schedule. The earliest thing Egmont seems to have produced was the cover of Anders And & Co. 35/1959.

The actual D-coded story program began in 1961 when Egmont decided it didn't have enough American (W-coded) stories to satisfy itself. It negotiated (with both Disney and Western Publishing's George Sherman at first) to create its own stories. The first ones were written in Danish by Knut Dokker (Egmont's then-editor-in-chief) and drawn by Nils Rydahl. Rydahl also redrew a lot of already-existing gags and stories at the time, including Bill Wright's classic "Spirited Drizzlepuss" (a Mickey and Goofy story that became a Donald story in the redraw).

The first Rydahl story, written in 1961 and appearing in Anders And 35/1962, was Donald Duck "In The Footsteps of Rembrandt." The story wasn't coded at the time, nor were Rydahl's others.

Later an "official" Egmont numbering/coding process began, whereby everything Rydahl did - stories, covers, puzzles, redrawn other material, and (probably) advertising art - were all assigned consecutive R-codes (for "Rydahl"). The first actual comic story to get a code like this was R 286, "Snow" (a half-page gag in Anders And 50/1968). As other artists (Adrian, Lagerwall, and Møller, as well as Antonio Gil-Bao) joined Rydahl, the R-code system became the D-code system.

It was at this time that the earliest Rydahl stories and other Egmont material were retroactively given codes. This extremely early body of work was now given special codes based on their publication issues - so "In The Footsteps of Rembrandt" became D 35/1962, and the earlier cover became D 35/1959.

Around 1971 the coding jumped from about D 1547, or whatever they'd reached at the time, to D 2001.

Egmont was called Gutenberghus before 1992. In the above we only used the name Egmont, for clarity.

Story codes

The D-codes are coded D + 4 digits. Beginning in the year after they reached D 10000 (1988), the stories are coded per year, e.g. D 88020. Since 2000, the year is fully listed, and a '-' is added for clarity. For instance D 2000-001.

1971 - 1981: D 2000 - D 6942 (2471 stories)
1982: D 6944 - D 7544 (300 stories)
1983: D 7546 - D 8166 (310 stories)
1984: D 8168 - D 8616 (224 stories)
1985: D 8618 - D 9070 (226 stories)
1986: D 9072 - D 9550 (239 stories)
1987: D 9552 - D 10168 (308 stories)
1988: 398 stories
1989: 307 stories
1990: 353 stories
1991: 426 stories

The covers and puzzle pages, etc. are still numbered in the "old" range.

For some reason, the stories of the Wuzzles, Gummibears and Winnie the Pooh (and some more) have their own story numbers, like D/GUB 101.

Beginning with D 5274 (or therabouts), all even codes are for stories, while the odd codes are for covers, puzzle pages, etc.

Story codes in the INDUCKS

In the INDUCKS, the D-codes are used almost as written on the stories:

"D" + 2 spaces + 4-digit code (D  3456)
or
"D" + 1 space + 5-digit code (D 93123)
or
"D" + 1 space + 4-digit year + '-' + 3-digit code (D 2000-001)

The Danish have redrawn a lot of "foreign" stories in the 60s and 70s. If we don't know their real D-codes, these stories get an INDUCKS code starting with "D ", plus an indication of the original story code. Examples (fictitious): "D WDC 123-01" (redrawn from "W WDC 123-01"), "D AT 123-A" (redrawn from "I AT 123-A"), "D S 67123" (from "S 67123").

All Egmont covers and illustrations since 1971 have an official code. This code, however, is often not printed, so it is only known in internal administrations. Therefore we use our own codes for them, starting with DC. The rest of the code is based on the first Danish publication. If a cover was not published in Denmark, but in another country, we use codes starting with GC (Germany), XSC (Sweden), or XNC (Norway).

contributions: David Gerstein (30.12.1998), Harry Fluks, Copywrite 5 (fall 1992)

This page was generated on 2009-06-17 by DVEGEN 4.8f © Harry Fluks 2003.
For more information contact Harry Fluks (h dot w dot fluks at wxs dot nl)