Production in Finland

General information

For lots of information about contemporary Finnish production, look on Timo Ronkainen's website!

Wallu (Harri Vaalio is his real name) drew and wrote during 1986-88 eleven Winnie the Pooh stories for the Finnish Winnie the Pooh and Winnie the Pooh activity magazines. You can recognize the stories he drew by the code in the first panel SF-01... etc.
In addition he drew a couple of competition illustrations and some vignette picture for the activity magazine. He also wrote and drew one story for Denmark, but as far as he knows it was never published.
Wallu's stories for the Winnie the Pooh magazine were 5-8-pagers, the stories for the activity magazine were always four-pagers.

This is what Wallu himself wrote about it (in March 1999):
In 1985 the finnish publisher of Disney-comics, Sanomprint, asked me (and two other fellows) to write and draw a five-page-story about Winnie The pooh. I think they were not satisfied with the material that was coming from Denmark. They wanted to produce pages also here in Finland. So I did the story and they took it (with the works of those other two artists) to the USA and the US Disney said to go ahead with me. I had to draw my first story again but then it was published in Finnish Winnie The Pooh magazine in 1986. After that I made ten more stories (4-8 pagers) to Finnish Winnie (5 were printed in normal Winnie-magazine, 6 in smaller Winnie Activity mag into which I also did some other drawins about Pooh, too). I believe they are never published elsewhere.

All the time I was drawing here in Finland the Danish didn’t like it. It all came to end when they said to the Finns, that if I continued to draw they don’t deliver any Donald Duck material to Finland... So to keep themselves out of harm Sanomaprint didn’t fire me but turned me to Gutenberghus.

Then I wrote one storyline in English to Denmark and they said Go ahead. I drew the story (Winnie The Pooh goes Woozlehunting) and sent it to them, but after a long time they sent me a letter in which they said sorry, but I wasn’t drawing like Disney material was supposed to be drawn. They even told me that I draw in old American way, but they had a new way (made in Spain...). And Sorry but that’s it, GOODBYE. They never paid me anything, and I was too angry to ask...

I really don’t know what happened to my 12th Winnie The Pooh story.
end of Wallu quote

Finnish cartoonist Mauri Kunnas made a Donald Duck story at some point in the 1970s. He had trained himself for a long time so that he was able to produce drawings VERY much Barks-like. In fact, when he offered the pages to the publisher (Egmont, probably) they refused to publish it because it was TOO MUCH like Barks. Anyway, they bought the script and someone else re-drew it.

Story codes

As said above, the Wallu stories carried a code starting with SF.

Story codes in the INDUCKS

The INDUCKS has no Finnish stories included yet. If they will be included, their codes will start with XF.

Some recent covers and illustrations (mostly by Don Rosa) were made for Finland, and have no known story code. We give them a code starting with XFC.

The XFC codes are also used for some special Finnish items, not produced for the regular Finnish publisher.

contributions: Henri Sivonen, Jyrki Vainio, Harri Vaalio

This page was generated on 2006-02-16 by DVEGEN 4.3 © Harry Fluks 2003.
For more information contact Harry Fluks (hfl at inducks.org - replace the at)