Production in the Netherlands (Oberon / Geïllustreerde Pers / VNU)

General information

Beginning in 1969, the Dutch editor had their own story production. They started with very bad and very short stories. In 1973, after Daan Jippes joined the crew, quality became much higher. Writers and artists were coached by Jippes, and the work by Barks was the great example.

Famous "Dutch" artists are Daan Jippes, Freddy Milton (a Dane), Ben Verhagen, Mau Heymans, Volker Reiche and Jan Gulbransson (both Germans).

Story codes

In 1969, the editor started its own production. The editor was then called Geïllustreerde Pers (Illustrated Press), and the first stories were coded with GP. In 1971 they started to code the stories with an H.

In 1972, GP was renamed to Oberon; about 1990, the Disney part of Oberon became GP again. And in 1998 they changed their name to VNU, before being bought by the Finnish company Sanoma.

From 1969 to 1972, the stories were only numbered by character, e.g. GP/MM/1 (= Jippes MM story). From 1973 to 1978, the stories were numbered by year and character, e.g. H/DD/7418. (In Gladstone reprints the `DD' was removed from the code: H 7418.) Since 1979, the stories are numbered by year only, e.g. H 7934.

Since 2000 they (oddly) omit the 2nd and 3rd character from the year. This means story codes from 2000 start with 20, from 2001 with 21, etc.

Story codes in the INDUCKS

There are also some "normalising" rules for the codes from 1953-1978. We refer to the index of H-coded stories for this.

The Dutch did not give most of their covers and illustrations a code. We use our own codes for them, starting with HC. The rest of the code is based on the first Dutch publication.

contributions: Harry Fluks