+Postage Due+Disney-comics digest #156.

[Don Rosa]

	Here's that German article I referred to. The translator of the
German comics (Klaus Strzyz) sent me a copy with the translation. This
appeared last week in the German news magazine FOCUS which they say is
like their version of NEWSWEEK or something. The article was a full
page and reprinted panels from the first page of my "The Duck who Fell
to Earth", including the first panel where DD & U$ are walking through
an area of junk yards to get to $crooge's salvage yard... and they
compare the panel of DD enetering the salvage yard to an old Barks
panel of DD entering his own backyard. The captions explain that this
is how I draw all of Duckberg and even Donald Duck's home. The text:

	DUCKBURG UNDER GARBAGE

	A DISNEY ARTIST LAYS HANDS ON THE DUCK FAMILY 
	EVERYTHING IS GETTING POISONED

	Duckburg, clean middle class home of Donald Duck, is totally
rotten; the once so cared for streets have ugly potholes; in the once so
nice gardens you find car wrecks, and rats chase stray cats through the
streets.
	Such conditions irritate the American Disney fans because they
remind them more of the dirty world of "Fritz the Cat" than of Duckburg
where, according to Disney, everything should be clean forever and its
inhabitants should always stay the same.
	Responsible for these rotten conditions is the American Don
Rosa, 42. The former construction engineer sold his wealthy company to
concentrate on Duckburg, and he placed the ducks from their suburban
idyll into a real existing big city American punkworld. This brought him
among fans a lot of worship and some consider him already as the only
legitimate heir to the legendary Disney artist Carl Barks who once
invented the Duck family.
	Those near to life stories have come to the attention of the
European Disney licensee Egmont in Copenhagen and their German daughter
Ehapa in Leifelden-Echterdingen. For the first time for years American
stories are ordered for the German books; in the years before it was
mainly the other way around. "Their livliness is so special, and as a
result the unusual way of drawing is accepted", says Ehapa publisher
Cornelia Stahl. Next Spring the publisher will bring the collected
stories of Don Rosa in bookform onto the market".
	This is a rather rare honor because until now the artists'
identities were always kept secret.
	"He is going to become a cult artist", says the literature
expert and Disney specialist Matthias Kringe.
	On the other hand, the anti-Rosa group cannot be ignored. It is
not only Rosa's fun on details until the last trash can that they don't
like. The artist from Louisville, Kentucky, has commited a sacrilege:
"The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck" which is appearing in German now.
	For decades it was in the dark what transgressor Rosa will
uncover soon: Uncle Scrooge's father was a nice but penniless craftsman,
his mother a housewife. His first dime was earned in Glasgow. ANd his
notorious thrifty career he started on a soft evening in May in - no
wonder - Louisville, Kentucky.