Columbus's charts, Beagle Boys

[Wilmer Rivers]

Don Rosa writes:
>	By the way, I am currently doing a combined sequel to both "The
> Guardians of the Lost Library" and "The Golden Helmet", titled (maybe?)
> "The Lost Charts of Columbus" or "Secret Maps of Columbus" or something
> like that.

If you're looking for research materials on Columbus's voyages to the
New World, you could do a lot worse than the "Columbus" one-shot comic
which Dark Horse published a couple of years ago.  It's by Starlen
Baxter and Jack Jackson.  It's well written, quite pretty, and insofar
as I can tell, historically sound.  Even if you can't use any of the
period information, it's a nice comic book to read, just for its own
sake.  As I always say, you can learn the most interesting things from
funnybooks.

Let's see, since this posting hasn't had anything to do with Disney
comics, how I can redeem it?  I'll ask a question about LO$ # 2.  Can
you give a thumbnail chronology of the Beagle Boys?  Everyone was trying
to come up with birth dates for Donald and HD&L to make chapter 12 work
out right, and I'm trying to do the same for the Beagles.  Are the
brothers in LOS # 2 one or two generations removed from the "present-
day" (i.e., circa 1955) Beagle Boys?  Since the brothers in LO$ # 2 are
apparently a bit older than Scrooge is, I don't think one of them could
be the father of the present Beagle Boys.  These Beagles may have been
born a bit before 1860, in which case one of them is the grandfather
of the present gang.  Is one of those brothers in fact "Grandpa Beagle"
(who becomes a squatter on the land where Scrooge will eventually, and
incorrectly, bury his money)?

While I'm at it, I might as well make a completely pointless comment
about LO$ # 1.  In the McDuck cemetery, one tombstone is labeled (at
least in the English-language edition) "Sir Roast Duck".  Was this just
a random gag, or were you making a reference to the legend in which an
ancient English king was so impressed by the cut of meat served at a
banquet that he pulled out his sword and "knighted" it, saying "I dub
thee Sir Loin"?  [Of course, scholars maintain that this word came into
English from the Norman French, who named it "sur loin" because this cut
of meat comes from above the loin.  But then what do the scholars know -
they probably didn't read enough funnybooks when they were kids.]

Wilmer Rivers
(sorry for wasting the bandwidth, but this list has been quiet lately)