>late 20s early 30s newspaper strips starring Mickey in comedy adventures start being made internally at Disney for King Syndicates
>the shorts were popular worldwide but strips are a more popular medium so they start being exported everywhere
>in Italy, bootleg translations and eventual copies start happening, until Disney tells them to stop but the publisher instead works with Disney to get them start being made officially
>Donald is also created and starts to become popular, so in Italy they make strips in the Mickey format but based on Donald
>In the US they start a new series of strips based on Silly Symphony, in which they just made stories based on whatever latest short had been made, but it slowly starts becoming the specific Donald strip
>In Italy, the official comics production gets stopped in the onset of war, and the publisher just starts making Mickey ripoff characters and continuing the strips with them- first a mouse called Topo Lino (as opposed to Mickey, who's named Topolino) and eventually just a weirdo short blonde guy and his tall friend who's a Goofy copy
>In the US, newspaper strips start getting reprinted in comic book magazine format, which becomes the most popular; a Disney storyboarder named Carl Barks decides to leave Disney and start working on new stories for the comics for Western, the publisher doing those comic book magazine reprints and that started doing their own new stories
>As the war goes on those comic books become more and more popular and, since they were cheaply made and given to soldiers to entertain themselves in the fields of war, start being carried worldwide wherever US Soldiers go, which includes Europe (but also Asia)
>Barks' new comics meanwhile are a cut above the rest, tighter more focused stories than the (also great) Mickey adventure strips, and the Donald Silly Symphony newspaper strips had always kept to just the gag formats. The authors of these comics were never officially credited, with the "author" always just being a signature indicating "by Walt Disney", but people will eventually start noticing that the stories by this one artist were a cut above the grade
>As the war ends, these comics, some of the most popular ever in the US, were now spread worldwide, and local publishers immediately capitalise on it, and local artists are inspired by them. In Italy, the publisher quickly switches back to official Disney comics again rather than the WW2 bootlegs, meaning the return of the Topolino magazine that's still being published today
>In the US, the newspaper strips had created nephews for Donald, and following that cue Barks creates an old Uncle for Donald and the kids, Scrooge, possibly based on an image of a stereotypical scottish Donald shown in a WW2 cartoon. The character was fun so Barks keeps using him and response is positive, so Barks keeps developing him more and more and eventually giving him the starring role in new adventures
>I assume throughout other European places like Germany, this is also when they start new printings of these US comics, of which Barks' stories were often the preferred, but everything else would get imported too, reprints of the newspaper strips, stories about other characters like Br'er Rabbit, etc
>In places like Italy, demand is so big that they start making their own stories again, doing their best to follow the format of existing stories but with their own flavour added
>In Brazil they start imported Disney comics magazines too, eventually focusing on Silly Symphony reprints starring José Carioca, a character made to be Brasilian
Forgot to point the other reason some of this might be wrong is simply my memory failing me
>As you hit the 50s, the US production is at its peak with some of the best Barks material, the Mickey newspaper strip is starting to get some of its weirder material after having transitioned fully into sci-fi adventure serials that introduced characters like the menacing Phantom Blot, an evil Moriarty-like figure, and overall Disney comics are some of the best selling ever
>Also relevant to point quickly that over in Japan Disney didn't have a presence per se but artists like Tezuka were directly influenced by these comics, so manga starts to evolve often thanks to these comics
>In Italy the focus is becoming more and more on their new comics, and slowly new characters start being made that stick around, or new interpretations of existing characters, such as focusing on the Barks character of Rockerduck, a one-off rival to Scrooge in one story, rather than Glomgold, another rival to Scrooge that seemed more important, probably simply because Rockerduck was a more recent character
>Towards the 60s US production starts to become worse- Barks stops writing his own stories as much, starts writing stories for other artists, eventually stops drawing stories at all and only writes these Boy Scout stories about the nephews for other artists to draw. In his place new authors come in but they're all noticeably of much weaker quality
>There was slightly higher quality comics still being made in the US, directly by Disney, but weirdly they were S-Coded- which means they were made FOR foreign markets only. These would get printed in places like Australia, Italy, or Brazil, but not in the US. A lot of the characters people consider "European" such as Donald's cousin Fethry were actually created in the US for these S-Code stories
>In Italy production was going stronger, and in Brazil after increased demand for José Carioca, they start at first localizing US Mickey and Donald stories- removing Mickey and Donald from them, and drawing José in their place, giving him two nephews to replace Mickey or Donald's nephews too- and eventually, in the late 60s, new production starts where Brazil makes their own comics from scratch, with José Carioca now living in the Rio de Janeiro favelas and with some of the S-Coded characters like Fethry or Hard Haid Moe getting new stories and becoming surprise hits through the 70s and 80s, with entire spinoff magazines
>In the 80s US production internally was utterly dreadful, and by the end Western/Dell/Gold Key stops publishing Disney comics altogether. However, this is the era where you start getting fan communities and fanzines and so on, and they eventually discover Barks' identity, figuring out who the figure fans had just titled "The Good Duck Artist" was. Small publishers get the license from Disney etc to do reprints of Barks' work, and a new publisher started by fans decides to get the license to continue the monthly Disney comics- mostly focusing on reprinting some of the best material that was being done in Europe, especially from Central and Northern Europe which had a more Barks-focused style
>Eventually a man named Don Rosa, who was a big Barks fan and part of comic fandom circles, discovers these new publishers in the US and manages to get in with them to do new Scrooge stories, where he'll try to match Barks the best he can but mix it with his own sensitivities. He becomes a success, especially in Europe when his stories are reprinted
>In the 60s, Italy had created a thief persona for Donald that had become a Superhero parody, think Adam West Batman. Through the 70s and 80s he'd become part of the main character stable in stories
>As part of that 80s US re-evaluation of Barks' comics and the popularity of his reprints etc, and even things like Indiana Jones being openly inspired by those stories, Disney TV Animation, looking for ideas of new content now they existed, decided to adapt Barks' stories into a new cartoon, as well as Gottfredson's Mickey newspaper strips. The latter got cancelled before any work was done on it though as the company found it too risky to use Mickey like that, but the former became Ducktales
>By the late 80s and early 90s, Disney decided to get in on comics in the US, as in, directly themselves, rather than give others the license, having seen the success companies like DC or Image were having. They took the comics license away from the smaller publisher made by fans, and had plans for a big prestige miniseries based on Scrooge's life. Don Rosa didn't want to work for Disney, but as it turns out, because his stories had been popular in Europe in reprints, European publishers started just hiring him directly- he'd be in the US, making stories for the European market, that then would be reprinted in the US. He set to create a larger comic series explaining Scrooge's life, as he didn't trust Disney's plan to do it; for their troubles, Disney figured this was a win win as it'd be cheaper for them if all they had to do was import the comic the foreign publishers paid for. This is why Rosa made Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, which became one of the most important Disney comics ever in breaking through the critical mainstream and gaining accolades and prizes
>In Brazil, some of the 70s and 80s boom was starting to wane and some of the magazines of spinoff characters were over, but production especially about José Carioca was still strong
>In Northern and Central Europe a new production boom was happening with an intensive focus on trying to mimic Barks, of which Rosa was just one part
>Meanwhile in the 90s in Italy, with things going as well as they usually did, they decide to also try and capitalise in the boom of US comics that was happening with Image etc, and make a comic spinoff in that format, focusing on Donald's superhero persona but taken more seriously- PKNA. It was a massive hit so they did a Mickey spinoff where he's a detective in a gritty city, Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine (which was also a hit but eventually cancelled by Disney out of image concerns with the use of Mickey), and a spinoff aimed at girls that was originally meant to star Daisy and a bunch of new witch friends, but once the authors made the case to Disney USA that it would work better without the ducks (something Disney Italy was vehemently insisting needed to be there, Daisy or bust) and Disney USA agreed, the existing Disney elements got removed and the magazine just became a new IP- W.I.T.C.H., which would later get a cartoon adaptation and recently a reboot. The PKNA magazine meanwhile when finished got a sequel, then a more kid-friendly reboot, then the reboot got a game adaptation, then years later a proper continuation of the original version started again but this time as stories in the existing Topolino magazine, not as its own magazine
>In Brazil comics started selling worse so production dropped and dropped until eventually no new stories were made, with only very recently new José Carioca stories being made again in Brazil
>In the US after the success of Rosa's work Disney tried to capitalise in his name, which he was not a fan of, trademarking it and eventually stopping Disney work after the mid 2000s. Their push to get into Comics from the early 90s ended in disaster as they overstretched themselves, so they started just giving the license to Disney comics to a revolving door of small publishers
>So the current state of Disney comics in 2025:
>In the US, national production is extremely rare, instead publishers such as Boom have eras where they import a lot of stories from all of Europe but give up when they don't sell as much. The few times new stories have been made, they tend to be under the specific license of Ducktales, the animated show, not the original Scrooge comics. This has changed most recently as Disney started finally just having Marvel make new comics with these characters, with very dubious results in terms of quality. Otherwise the best you're getting is reprints by Fantagraphics
>In Central and North Europe, they've kept their production mostly as it was before, but slowly they're getting more mandates and orders and interference from Disney directly, most visibly in the forbidding from making new Br'er Rabbit stories, which was one of the most popular line there where the connection to african americans was non-existent- they just saw it as tales about a rabbit in the forest
>In Brazil, production disappeared then reappeared in a very tiny amount recently, and I'm not sure if it might not have disappeared again. Mostly it's lived out of reprints from all over for the past few decades
>France had the occasional production through the decades but have gotten the most relevance recently as Glènat got the Disney license and started making Franco-Belgian style, 70-page-or-so Album comics of Mickey, Donald, etc, in experimental styles
>Italy has become the internal Disney production powerhouse, especially after a controversial cover that homaged the victims of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks made Disney HQ go "what the fuck are you guys doing" and bring them under their own control. Those new US stories made by Marvel, etc? The art is actually always by Italian artists, whom Disney now considers the only ones trained to do Disney comics and forces any comics involving these cartoon characters to be drawn by, even in licenses that traditionally had nothing to do with Scrooge etc, such as Darkwing Duck.