Donald Duck pocket books

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The Donald Duck pocket books are a series of comic books published in various European countries, starring the Walt Disney characters Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and their various friends.

The books, which have been published irregularly (about 6 times a year) until 1987 and monthly since, are roughly A5-sized and about 250 pages thick. Each book has about eight stories, but the numbers of stories can vary widely from issue to issue. As of 2006, there were more than 300 books. In the early days, these stories used to be connected with each other by a framework story, forming a general story line throughout the entire book, but nowadays each story is usually completely independent. For every of those early issues, the publishers mostly chose unrelated stories from a large pool, and it was only after those stories had been chosen that a fitting framework would be written, then drawn in a sub-standard quality style by artist Giuseppe Perego. Almost all stories come from European publishers - namely Mondadori/Disney Italy from Italy and, more recently, Egmont from Denmark.

The same stories, which are mostly written and drawn by Italian writers and artists, are translated into different languages and appear in each country roughly about the same time, but there are differences of one or two months between the publishing schedules of different countries.

Various local names for the Donald Duck pocket books include:

• Danish: Jumbobog
• Finnish: Aku Ankan Taskukirja
• German: Walt Disneys Lustige Taschenbücher (by issue #119, April 1987, the title was changed to Walt Disney Lustiges Taschenbuch instead)
• Icelandic: Myndasögusyrpa
• Italian: Topolino
• Norwegian: Donald Pocket
• Swedish: Kalle Ankas Pocket
• Dutch: Donald Duck Pocket

All these books started publishing in 1967 and 1968 respectively, except for the Finnish version, which started in 1970, and the Icelandic which started in 1994