I checked in for a moment...
An excellent question from "freidhelm", one I'm often asked by European Disney comics fans:
>>>>>Have you ever read Gottfredson's comics? Didn't your sister collect them too?
No, she did not, because there WEREN'T any. The only place that an American could ever have seen Gottfredson was in the newspaper strips when they were new (and we did not have the MM strip in the Louisville paper), or by seeing reprints of the MM strips in WDC&S (our WALT DISNEY'S COMICS & STORIES) #1-100, published in the 1940's. My sister's collection did not begin until late 1949 after the Gottfredson strip reprints ceased. So I grew up with the Paul Murry MM which was okay, but I never saw, never had a CHANCE of seeing any Gottfredson strips until Glasdtone reprinted them. And then I did not pay much attention because I was not interested in Mickey Mouse. I was told by several people how good the Gottfredson strips were, and I believed them... but... y'see, I am not a Disney comics fan. I'm a Carl Barks fan. Aside from Barks, I like hundreds of other sorts of comics, none of them Disney.
I've been to Italy enough times to know that you'll find this amazing, but you Italians have so much MORE knowledge of American comic history than Americans! You've always had reprints of all the classic American strips of the 1930s & 1940s. The average American has no idea that there has ever been anything in the newspaper other than crap like "Garfield" or all that modern sketchy nonsense. They have no idea would a RICH comics heritage we have. And they don't care. If it's not NEW and HOT, an American is not interested. Italians know more about the history of American movies also! Really, America is wonderful in many ways, but culturally it's a wasteland. One misses out on a LOT growing up in a wasteland.