Walt Disney's Donald Duck character has a peculiarly strong position in Finnish culture. This is due to Aku Ankka, the Finnish Donald Duck comic series that has been published in Finland since 1951. It has been one of the most-read publications in Finland ever since, and subscribing to Aku Ankka has become a tradition in many Finnish families. Aku Ankka is widely read among both children and grown-ups and it is generally highly esteemed.

Donald Duck's success in Finland is an interesting phenomenon, since there has been no equivalent in the other Nordic countries or even in the USA, where, in fact, the circulations of Disney comics have dropped drastically from the early years. This paper describes why Aku Ankka is so popular in Finland. What are the qualities that have made it so successful? Why is it considered to be of such high quality that grown-ups also want to read it? In what sense can it be regarded as a Finnish institution?

Donald Duck's History in Finland

Disney comic strips were first published in the United States in January, 1930. Surprisingly soon, already in March 1930, they had reached Finland as well, where the Tampere daily newspaper Aamulehti started to publish Mickey Mouse comic strips. Rather curiously by today's standards, Aamulehti presented the new comic character to its readers by saying: "This gentleman is Mickey, he comes from darkest Africa" (Tolvanen 28-29). Back then black people were not familiar to Finns and they were rarely presented in cultural products. Since Aamulehti dispensed with Mickey Mouse strips in just a couple of years, it has been speculated whether this had something to do with Aamulehti thinking Mickey Mouse was an African (Kallionpää). The Helsinki daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat started to publish Mickey Mouse strips right after Aamulehti. The first magazine to publish Donald Duck comic strips in Finland was Seura, a Helsinki-based family magazine, in 1937 (Tolvanen 28). Seura was owned by the Sanoma Osakeyhtiö publishing house, as was Helsingin Sanomat.

In the United States the first Walt Disney comic series published regularly was Mickey Mouse Magazine in 1935. In 1940 it changed its name to Walt Disney Comics and Stories. The second Disney comic series was Four Color, which was published from 1939 onwards. Until 1941 both series published old stories which had already been published in newspapers. By 1941 the old stories had run out and new ones had to be created (Tolvanen 29).

In 1951 Sanoma Osakeyhtiö started to publish Aku Ankka, the first Finnish publication that consisted of only Walt Disney comics. Although the comic was named after Donald Duck, it also included stories of several other Walt Disney characters, such as Mickey Mouse and the Big Bad Wolf¹. The first issue of Aku Ankka sold 34,017 copies, which was a remarkably high figure for any publication back then. Even 50 years later, in 2001, this number would have been big enough to make the issue the third most-popular publication in Finland (Tolvanen 28).

From the very beginning, a lot of time, energy and money was invested in Aku Ankka in order to make it a successful, high-quality comic. The advertising of Aku Ankka was taken seriously by the publisher. The two people behind bringing Donald Duck to Finland were Eljas Erkko, the manager of Sanoma Osakeyhtiö at the time, and Risto Kavanne, the manager of the printing house of Sanoma Osakeyhtiö. According to Aki Hyyppä, the current Managing Editor of Aku Ankka, they could sense the enormous business potential of Aku Ankka and were also personally fond of Donald Duck. Already in the 1950s Kavanne even called Aku Ankka "the goldmine of Sanoma Osakeyhtiö" (Hyyppä).

Almost throughout the 1950s, Aku Ankka had an advertisement once a week in Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's biggest newspaper, which took one third of the front page². Aku Ankka itself was only published once a month in the beginning, which goes to show how aggressive its advertising was. As Helsingin Sanomat was published by the same publishing house as Aku Ankka, Sanoma Osakeyhtiö, the agents selling subscriptions to Helsingin Sanomat also sold subscriptions to Aku Ankka. The agents were further motivated by bonuses as high as one third of the price of each additional Aku Ankka subscription sold (Tolvanen 28). According to Managing Editor Aki Hyyppä, the business potential of Aku Ankka was possibly sensed early on (Hyyppä); this might be the reason for Sanoma Osakeyhtiö choosing this relatively grand marketing strategy.

With their effective selling of Aku Ankka, the agents gave a start to the Finnish tradition of subscribing to Aku Ankka as opposed to buying issues of it occasionally from news-stands or grocery stores. When the children who once had been subscribers to Aku Ankka grew up, they passed on this tradition and subscribed to the comic for their own children. Unlike with Disney comics elsewhere in the world, in Finland the sale of Aku Ankka has been based on subscriptions from the very beginning (Tolvanen 28). According to Jukka Heiskanen, the current editor-in-chief of Aku Ankka, this is partly behind the comic's success: parents subscribed to Aku Ankka for their children. If children wanted to read other comics they may have had to use their pocket money to buy them, whereas Aku Ankka has never had to compete with other comics for children's pocket money (Kallionpää).

Neither did Aku Ankka really have any competitors when it started out, since there was only one other comic that was published regularly. This was Sarjakuvalehti [Comic magazine], which had been published since 1949. Sarjakuvalehti never reached a circulation comparable to Aku Ankka: at its best the circulation number was around 20,000 (Kaukoranta and Kemppinen 205). Sarjakuvalehti consisted mainly of American comics by different artists focused on adventures that fascinated primarily boys (Tolvanen 27). Furthermore, Sarjakuvalehti was printed in a format that was half black and white and half four-colour, whereas Aku Ankka was completely four colour (Tolvanen 27). These things might have been among the reasons why Aku Ankka was more successful than Sarjakuvalehti.

Another important area in the making of Aku Ankka that received a lot of attention from early on was the translation of the comics. Thanks to the good Finnish translators, Aku Ankka has always been highly esteemed among grown-ups. One might say that because of the careful translations Aku Ankka has been "promoted" to being considered a "grown-ups' comic" as well.

In the USA the circulations of Disney comics have dropped drastically from the early years (Manninen 34), whereas in 2006 Aku Ankka's circulation in Finland was larger than ever, with the highest-selling issue reaching a total of 320,514 sold copies (Kallionpää). The former record (317,570 copies) was from 1975 (Tolvanen 115). Today Aku Ankka is the most widely-read weekly publication in Finland (Akun). According to the results of the National Media Survey conducted in 2006-07 by TNS Gallup, a Finnish market research company, Aku Ankka has 1,047,000 readers — this number leaves behind even Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's biggest newspaper (Lehdet).

The Language of Aku Ankka

Aku Ankka is held in high esteem by grown-ups especially because of the quality of its Finnish language, which is considered to be remarkably good. The Department of Finnish Language and Literature at the University of Helsinki chose the language of Aku Ankka to be the Kielihelmi ("a language gem") of the year 2001 (Aku). This title is awarded every year to a language phenomenon that is regarded as positively enriching the Finnish language.

Good language has been an important part of Aku Ankka from the very beginning. The first editor-in-chief, Sirkka Ruotsalainen, wanted Aku Ankka to be published in perfectly fluent Finnish. Ruotsalainen was already an experienced comic translator when she started working for Aku Ankka as an editor and as one of the translators of Walt Disney's comics. Ruotsalainen was determined to translate Disney's comics into colourful standard Finnish. By contrast, in Sweden Kalle Anka, the Swedish Donald Duck comic, was translated into Swedish slang. Aatos Erkko, the general manager of the Sanoma Osakeyhtiö publishing house, was convinced that this decision was behind Kalle Anka's lack of success in Sweden (Tolvanen 114).

However, Sirkka Ruotsalainen not only translated the comics for Aku Ankka into good Finnish, but also carefully edited the language of the stories to make it appeal more to Finnish children (Tolvanen 114). The material for Aku Ankka came (and still comes) mainly from Denmark, where the original comics were translated into Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. The editors of Aku Ankka then translated the comics from Danish to Finnish.

In 1990 Pirjo Luoto, a student of German Translation in the University of Tampere, compared the Finnish and German translations of Disney comics in her Master's Thesis titled Kuva, kupla ja kultturierot [Image, bubble and cultural differences]. According to Luoto, Aku Ankka and the German Micky Maus were published once a week and consisted mainly of same comic stories (59). Although as a whole the translations were rather similar, in their individual speech bubbles they differed notably (Luoto 66). Luoto states that one reason for this could be that the Finnish stories had been translated via a third language. In Germany translators were translating the original English comics, whereas in Finland translations began with a previous translation from the original English into Danish, which was then re-translated into Finnish. This way the contents of the stories inevitably changed somewhat, because the first translator had already made his/her own interpretation of the story, which the second translator then interpreted even further.

Luoto pointed out that the translations mainly differed in style: the comics of the German Micky Maus are rather formal, only somewhat-colourful language (66), whereas Aku Ankka clearly seeks an exceptionally colourful linguistic form (55). In the language of Aku Ankka repetition is avoided: in one story eight different words were used when referring to the Beagle Boys, whereas in the German version only four words were used (Luoto 65).

The editors of Aku Ankka have created a "duck vocabulary" in which the words and phrases are often translated into a form that contains some duck-related words. For instance idioms that contain the word nose would have the word "beak" instead. The idiom "rushed off one's feet" would in duck form naturally be "rushed off one's webs". Luoto listed some examples of "duck vocabulary" (64) such as Monte Ducklo (referring to Monte Carlo) and Gran Ankaria (ankka is Finnish for duck, so this refers to the Gran Canaria island in Spain, one of the most popular winter resorts for Finnish tourists). "Duck vocabulary" is a good example of how colourful the language of Aku Ankka is. The actual grammatical quality of Aku Ankka is harder to represent in English, because the good language can naturally only be understood by native Finnish speakers.

Right Place, Right Time

Besides the high-quality language and comics, there are other factors that possibly have also contributed to Aku Ankka becoming so popular. Timing is one of these factors. The first issue of Aku Ankka was published only seven years after the Continuation War³ against the Soviet Union. It was felt that in order to survive both economically and culturally, Finland had to turn to the West. These feelings supported a mood of Americanisation in Finland, and might also explain why such an obviously American product as a Walt Disney comic suddenly also captured the national imagination (Manninen 36).

A Finnish researcher of comics, Pekka Manninen, has stated that, unlike other comics, Aku Ankka has always been popular across socioeconomic boundaries and in rural as well as urban areas. Therefore, there must be something in the basic structure of the comic stories published in Aku Ankka that pleases Finnish readers and creates a sense of security (Manninen 37-38). One of the suggested continuous themes is the capitalistic atmosphere, but the attitudes towards capitalism differ quite drastically between the stories. The comic artist Carl Barks for instance, who drew many of the early Donald Duck stories, created at least two stories with opposite views on capitalism. The story A Financial Fable has a very capitalistic atmosphere, and deals with the themes of work ethics and consuming. In contrast Too Many Ants emphasises the importance of spare time and shows constant working as foolish (Manninen 40-42). Disney comics are locally produced and rewritten all over the world, with the result that inevitably the national versions of Disney comic stories reflect aspects of the local national culture. Variation can be seen for instance in the high quality and colourful language of the Finnish Aku Ankka (Manninen 43).

A Finnish journalist, Ilkka Malmberg, has pointed out that Finns are especially fond of the character of Donald Duck. Mickey Mouse only has a supporting role. Finns are generally seen as inclined to melancholy and often not wanting to stand out as being different. Maybe therefore Finns tend to find Mickey's ever positive and cheerful character as even being annoying. In contrast, Donald is viewed as being unlucky, lazy and immodest; according to Malmberg, it is Donald's imperfection that makes him so dear to Finns (30).

Tradition in Finnish Families

Aku Ankka established itself as a Finnish cultural institution already in the 1950s, and after that nothing has shaken its status. According to Heikki Kaukoranta and Jukka Kemppinen, both translators and researchers of comics, the quality of Aku Ankka dropped in the 1960s because its chief comic artist at that time, Carl Barks, had too much work to do and so many new Disney comic series had been started that it was impossible to keep up the general high quality. However, this had hardly any effect on the circulation, since the high quality of the comic in earlier years had stabilised its popularity; Aku Ankka had already become a tradition in Finnish families (Kaukoranta and Kemppinen 121, 273). In 1982 Kaukoranta and Kemppinen stated that the continuing popularity of Aku Ankka was only due to people's nostalgia for the good old times (121).

This might have been the case back then. However, in 2007 Aku Ankka is more popular than ever (Kallionpää), and the current subscribers form already the fourth or fifth generation of Aku Ankka readers. Nostalgia and "former quality" alone could hardly be enough to stretch the success this far. Neither did Kaukoranta and Kemppinen know that Disney comics were about to get a comic artist who might even be called "the saviour of Aku Ankka" in Don Rosa.

Don Rosa, Successor to Carl Barks

Until the end of the 1990s, all comic stories in Aku Ankka were published under the Walt Disney company name (Manninen 22). Therefore people did not know the names of the comic artists and scriptwriters, and it was even generally believed that Walt Disney himself drew all the comics (Tuliara 44). However, the readers of Aku Ankka had paid attention to especially good comics that were clearly drawn by the same artist. In 1972 Markku Kivekäs, one of Aku Ankka's editors at the time, wrote in co-operation with editor Jukka Rislakki an article for Helsingin Sanomat, in which the name of this artist was revealed: Carl Barks (Tuliara 80, 143). Carl Barks, who died in 2000 at the age of 99 (Ronkainen 12), is regarded as the best Disney comic artist of all time, and his work is very well known in Finland. He started working for Walt Disney publications as early as in 1941.

Hugo Keno Don Rosa, who started drawing for Disney in 1986, is a passionate Barks fan (Ronkainen 126). Barks has had a big influence on Don Rosa's work, especially on his scriptwriting. At the same time, Rosa has developed his own style, which is very rich in detail. Don Rosa's storylines are quite complicated, and his references to history are always very accurate. Partly thanks to Don Rosa, Finnish readers feel that Aku Ankka improves children's general knowledge, since children can learn history from Rosa's stories in an amusing way. Good examples of this are Rosa's stories The Son of the Sun, in which the ducks learn about the history of the Incas, and The Curse of Nostrildamus, which tells about the legendary seer, Michel de Nostredame — "Nostrildamus" in Duck language (Heiskanen 43-70, 145-156).

Don Rosa has now become as big a name in Finland as Carl Barks, and his comics are very likely one reason why Aku Ankka has maintained its success even now, when there will no longer be new Carl Barks stories. Don Rosa is aware of his popularity in Finland; in 1999 he drew especially for Finns a story called The Quest for Kalevala, which is based on the Finnish national epic Kalevala⁴. It was published with other Don Rosa comics in a book called Sammon salaisuus (The Quest for Kalevala). Although comics are rarely seen on the top of best-seller lists, this book topped the Finnish charts (Ronkainen 126). Don Rosa has visited Finland several times and his fans and the Finnish media always treat him like a superstar. Among Finnish readers, these two comic artists, Carl Barks and Don Rosa, are generally credited with the success of Aku Ankka.

In addition to foreign comic artists, Aku Ankka today also has one Finnish comic artist: Kari Korhonen, who is a drawer and scriptwriter for Disney comics all around the world (Ronkainen 162). His success is likely to help Disney comics to maintain their popularity in Finland also in the future.

Dissenting Views to Disney Comics

It has been suggested that Walt Disney products were so welcome to Finnish culture because of the good "family" image of the Disney Corporation. The Disney comics that Aku Ankka consisted of were seen as harmless; potentially disturbing aspects of reality, such as birth (which turns comic characters into sexual beings) or death had been excluded from the world of Disney products (Manninen 26-27).

However, there was also some opposition to Aku Ankka and comics in general. As with television, videos and computer games in the following decades, some people in the 1950s considered comics to be bad for children. Comics were seen as a substitute for proper culture, and were even accused of encouraging juvenile delinquency (Manninen 16). Grown-ups tended to underestimate or frown on any cultural products that were made primarily for children or teenagers.

The biggest opposition to Aku Ankka came in the 1960s and early 1970s when special attention was being paid to the American values and attitudes that Disney products clearly conveyed, such as capitalism and class division (Manninen 27-28). Marxism was a popular way of approaching Disney comics in the 1970s and 1980s. A book called How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in Disney Comic [sic] was translated into Finnish in 1980. Originally published in Chile, the book was written in 1971 in Spanish by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart as a critique of indoctrinating Chilean children into believing in capitalism through American comics. However, the world of this book did not quite match Finnish society, since in Finland the comics had not been manipulated as they had been in Chile, where evil comic characters were sometimes named Marx and Engels (Tuliara 57). Instead, in the Finnish Aku Ankka the American origin is only seen in the townscape of the city of Ducksburg and in the objects seen in the stories, such as American-style post boxes or apple pies (Malmberg 60).

As Pekka Manninen has observed, Disney comics have often been controversial; attitudes towards disputed subjects like capitalism have differed greatly not only between the stories but also between how translations of the comics into different languages and cultures have 'interpreted' these stories. Therefore, seeing either Aku Ankka or other Disney comics as Trojan horses of a certain ideology hardly reveals the truth (Manninen 43). However, critiques similar to those voiced in Chile by Dorfman and Mattelart have rarely been part of the Finnish experience with Disney comics. The long-term and almost universal popularity of the comic for children and adults alike is evidence of this.

Can Aku Ankka Be Considered a "Finnish Institution"?

As shown above, the history of Aku Ankka in Finland, its unique subscribership and readership status over the years, the colourful expressions of its high-quality Finnish translation, and the perceived 'educational benefit' of its stories show that the comic has a long-standing and significant status in Finnish popular culture history. Yet is this enough for Aku Ankka to be considered a "Finnish Institution"?

All the assumptions so far in this paper about the popularity and status of Aku Ankka in Finland are either from comic researchers, or those who are or have been involved in the production and marketing of Aku Ankka, or from the author of this paper. What about the opinions of ordinary readers — those for whom the comic is intended? Reader opinions were seldom available in the sources consulted for this paper. If surveyed, would readers agree with the assumptions presented above about the "institutional" status of Aku Ankka in Finland?

Reader Responses: A Survey of University Student Opinion

To find out whether grown-up readers really find Aku Ankka to also be a "grown-up comic" and whether they agree with the source material claims about the high quality of the language and educational aspect of Aku Ankka's comic stories, a survey was conducted in spring 2007 among students on three university student mailing lists in Tampere. The objective was to learn if grown-up students did still read Aku Ankka regularly or even still subscribed to it, and if those students who were parents subscribed to it for their children. Respondents were asked whether they considered Aku Ankka to be a "children's comic" and whether they thought Aku Ankka represented "remarkably good Finnish" and "improved one's general knowledge". They were also given an opportunity to describe Aku Ankka in their own words, in case what they felt to be important aspects had been overlooked in the questions presented.

The research instrument used was a web questionnaire, which was posted in the author's personal directories on the University of Tampere web server between 28 March and 08 April 2007, with an e-mailed invitation to respond to the questionnaire sent to the three student lists on the same day. (Here are the questionnaire's Finnish and English versions [with the English version having been translated for readers of this paper].)

The first of these mailing lists was that of Cortex, the student organisation of Psychology students in the University of Tampere. While the number of people on any "open" mailing list may vary on a daily basis, at the time of sending the invitation there were roughly 200 people on the Cortex list. (On 8 January 2008 the exact number of people on the Cortex list was 204.) The second list consisted of 18 students of Information Technology in the TAMK University of Applied Sciences who had started their studies in 2005. The third list consisted of 30 English Translation students in the University of Tampere, 27 of whom had started their studies in 2005, with the three others also English Translation students from earlier years. These three lists were chosen in order to get responses from both male and female students from significantly different study programmes in at least two types of higher education institutions so that a diversity of views could be assumed on the questions posed. The majority of Psychology students and English Translation students were female and the majority of Information Technology students were male.

The presumption of chosing these lists was also that a statistically significant quantity of responses could be obtained from their subscribers, and that many — if not most — of the students would have read and/or subscribed to Aku Ankka during their childhood, if not still as university students who were living independently from their parents and could thus be considered "grown-up."

These presumptions were proved valid by the responses. A total of 67 responses were received in the eleven days during which the questionnaire was online. Judged against business direct-mail response rates, where a 2-3% return is 'high average'⁵, the 27% return rate of this survey, where respondents also had to click to and complete a web form, might be considered astounding. Moreover, of all 67 responses, half were received during the first two days. Both the 27% response rate and the large number of 'immediate' responses show that students embraced the notion of Aku Ankka as a Finnish institution. Responses came from a relatively wide age spread, ranging from 17 to 42⁶, with an average age of 24 and median age of 24.5. Fifty-nine (88%) of the respondents were in their twenties. Fifty-one (76%) of the respondents were female and 16 (24%) were male.

Sixty (90%) of the 67 respondents had been subscribers to Aku Ankka as children, which shows not only that the tradition of subscribing to Aku Ankka is so strong that it can easily be called an "institution", but also suggests — considering that at least some children must instead of subscribing read either library copies of the comics or those of friends — that the readership of Aku Ankka is a near-universal experience for Finnish children.

Is Aku Ankka Considered To Be a Children's Comic?

When asked to evaluate on a scale of one to five (one for "not true at all" and five for "completely true"), whether Aku Ankka is a children's comic, only two (3%) chose number five. The majority seemed to consider Aku Ankka as being meant for both children and grown-ups, since 58 (87%) of the 67 responses gave answers between two and five. However, the responses also suggested that the answer to this question might not be perfectly clear. As one respondent noted, it is hard to classify Aku Ankka as a purely children's or grown-ups' comic, since some of its stories appeal to grown-ups while others appeal only to children. Comparing Aku Ankka to other comics was also seen as being complicated, because Aku Ankka is clearly different from obviously grown-ups' comics (e.g. Hugo Pratt's serious Corto Maltese or Neil Gaiman's Sandman, a mixture of horror and fantasy) but not quite like purely children's comics either.

Do Grown-ups Continue to Read and Subscribe to Aku Ankka?

The results showed that Aku Ankka is still read among grown-ups; Seven (10%) of the respondents reported that they subscribed to Aku Ankka at the moment, and a total of 11 (16%) reported that they read it regularly, which means that in addition to the subscribers, a further 6 per cent of the respondents still read Aku Ankka regularly without subscribing to it. The 16% readership figure might be considered high for university students who are presumably fully occupied with studies, part-time jobs and other pressing concerns of their time-short 'grown-up' lives.

None of the student parents who subscribed to Aku Ankka subscribed to it for their children; rather, they got it for themselves. One female respondent had subscribed to Aku Ankka for her boyfriend, which again can be seen as an example of Aku Ankka's institution-like status: people in other cultures might find subscribing to a comic for an adult boyfriend/girlfriend rather peculiar.

Only 2 of the 7 subscribers paid for their subscription themselves, which suggests that either their parents or someone else had paid the subscription for the remaining five, in which case their subscription to Aku Ankka may not have been a personal choice, but instead may have reflected an on-going tradition from childhood years whereby parents continued to provide their "children" with an Aku Ankka subscription even after their children had grown into adults. It is also possible that boyfriends/girlfriends had paid the subscription for the other five subscribers.

Is the Language of Aku Ankka Especially Good and Rich?

On the basis of the responses, the statements of this paper about the high-quality language and educational aspect of Aku Ankka also seem to hold true. When asked whether they thought the Finnish in Aku Ankka is especially good and rich (on a scale of one to five), 17 (25%) of the respondents answered five for "completely true", while 19 (28%) chose four and 21 (31%) three. Although the quality of the stories was otherwise seen as varying, the language was considered overall to be good. Many especially mentioned the colourful expressions used in the comic, such as the duck vocabulary mentioned earlier, which were thought to improve vocabulary.

Does Aku Ankka Improve General Knowledge?

Aku Ankka was also considered "educating", since when asked to evaluate on a scale of one to five if the stories of Aku Ankka improved general knowledge, 19 (28%) answered four and 9 (13%) even five. In the section where respondents could write about Aku Ankka in their own words, particularly Don Rosa's comics were praised for teaching history to children.

Overall Conclusions Reached on the Basis of the Survey

The survey results thus fully support the assumptions derived from the paper's source material. Grown-up readers do seem to regard Aku Ankka as an educating, high-quality comic. Nor is the statement that grown-ups still read and subscribe to Aku Ankka a myth, since the survey results show that 16 per cent of the respondents still read the comic regularly. It is hard to imagine another weekly publication in Finland that would be read regularly by a comparably significant percentage of university students.

Aku Ankka As an Undisputed Part of Finnish Cultural Heritage

On the basis of both the source material and survey, it seems fully justifiable to claim that Aku Ankka has undisputed status as one of the 'institutions' of Finnish culture. Yet what might the future hold?

Unlike in the 1950s, nowadays Aku Ankka has to compete with many other comics, varying from Japanese manga to old-school superhero comics. Nevertheless, Aku Ankka today is more popular than ever. After several years of steady rising in circulation, Aku Ankka broke its previous circulation record in 2006, with the highest-selling issue selling a total of 320,514 copies. The former record was from the year 1975. Also the success of Kari Korhonen, the only Finnish comic artist drawing and scriptwriting for Disney comics all over the world, will probably help Disney comics to maintain their popularity in Finland in the future.

Aku Ankka has reached its popularity and unique status in Finland because it was never taken as "only" a children's comic; it was considered to possibly be grown-up reading as well. It owes its success to good timing as well as careful editing and translating. The qualities that have made it possible for Aku Ankka to maintain its success year after year are its high-quality, colourful Finnish language and imaginative, sometimes even educating, stories. All these things have supported Aku Ankka becoming a Finnish institution, and should most likely also help maintain its institutional status in future.

As this paper has shown, the Finnish tradition of reading Aku Ankka continues to be strong, and it is likely to stay that way as long as new generations pass the tradition on to their children. Aku Ankka has become such an undisputed part of Finnish cultural heritage that Finns hardly will give it up easily.

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Notes

1. When I refer to the Disney comics of Aku Ankka in this paper, I not only mean Donald Duck comics but the whole content of Aku Ankka, which consists of Disney comic stories with different characters.

2. Traditionally, the first page of Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's leading quality newspaper, has been filled with advertisements.

3. Finland fought the Soviet Union twice during World War II: first during the Winter War in 1939-1940 and then in the "Continuation War" in 1941-1944. Finland remained independent, but had to submit to reparations and restraints. Finland's location between the Western countries and the Soviet Union made Soviet relations a special concern especially after the World War II and during the Cold War.

4. Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, is an epic poem compiled from Finnish folklore by Finnish Elias Lönnrot in 19th century. Kalevala consists of nearly 23,000 verses. It is considered one of the most significant works of Finnish literature.

5. See 'Direct Mail Response Rates at www.gaebler.com, which quotes an industry average of 2.61%, but with response rates typically much lower than this.

6. It had been assumed when sending the invitation to participate in the survey to the three e-mail lists that all the respondents would be from among the university students subscribed to those lists. However, since the webform responses were anonymous, this cannot be confirmed. It is therefore possible that not all of the respondents were in fact students, since some of the invitation recipients may have passed on the URL of the webform to other persons they felt would have been interested (brothers, sisters, etc.). In particular, this might apply to the 17-year-old; while it is not unusual to have 'mature' students of 42 or even older in the university, it would be unusual in Finland to be a university student already at age 17. Nonetheless, even if there had been non-students who also responded, this would not affect the validity of the survey, as the objective was to obtain feedback from 'grown-up' readers rather than specifically just students.

Appendices

1. The Questionnaire (in Finnish, and translated into English)
2. Followup Report

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• - - - . Suo, kuokka ja Aku Ankka. Maailman hauskin kuvasarjalehti. Ed. Juhani Tolvanen. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 2001. 30-31.

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• Ronkainen, Timo. Carl Barks. Maailman hauskin kuvasarjalehti. Ed. Juhani Tolvanen. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 2001. 12.

• - - - . Don Rosa. Maailman hauskin kuvasarjalehti. Ed. Juhani Tolvanen. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 2001. 126.

• - - - . Kari Korhonen. Maailman hauskin kuvasarjalehti. Ed. Juhani Tolvanen. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 2001. 162.

• Tolvanen, Juhani. Aku Ankan menestystarinan juuret eli alkoiko kaikki todellakin hiirestä. Maailman hauskin kuvasarjalehti. Ed. Juhani Tolvanen. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 2001. 28-29.

• - - - . Neljä walttiässää eli Aku Ankan päätoimittajat kautta aikojen. Maailman hauskin kuvasarjalehti. Ed. Juhani Tolvanen. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 2001. 114-117.

• Tuliara, Pekka, ed. Disney, Aku & minä. Jyväskylä: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 2007.

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Last Updated 24 April 2010