Rosa Stuf'

[Dwight Decker]

Don Rosa's comments on the coloring of the European printings of his
stories were pretty devastating after I so innocently remarked on how
nice the art looked. I guess was seduced by the larger page size of
the German albums, which gave his art room to breathe (it sometimes
seems cramped in American funnybook-page size), the lighter coloring,
which let the black outlines show up better, and the better paper
stock. I've gotten so used to unintelligent coloring in European
reprints of American stories that I hardly noticed that aspect of it.
	As for what the German translator did to Don's story, "Mythological
Menagerie" (AR 104), you can sorta sense something's going on when three
lines of word-balloon copy in English are reduced to two in German
translation. A lot of Don's colloquial expressions and flavoring were
simply cut out in favor of something fairly bland and straightforward.
Where the translator was backed into a corner and forced by the artwork
to come up with something to fill the word balloons (as in the byplay on
the "Booneheads" jokes), he managed a German equivalent, but only when he
absolutely had to, it looked like. Interestingly, when Don's original
spoke of "a pink lynx and a chartreuse--", the translator apparently
thought "chartreuse" was a noun at the end of a complete sentence, not
an adjective dangling at the end of an incomplete sentence with the noun
it was supposed to modify never spoken. I also get the idea that the
translator thought Don made all those mythological animals up, and some of
their countries of origin were changed to something else. I don't have the
book in front of me to cite examples, but if Don has a copy of the German
edition, he can probably see it for himself.
	Getting back to coloring...one coloring error in the Life of Scrooge
had the colorist apparently unaware that a map on the wall represented a
real coastline (specifically, the American gulf coast), and arbitrarily
splashed a mass of blue deep into what should have been the interior of
Louisiana.
	On the subject of using American film for European reprints...one of
the books I brought back from my recent jaunt to the Old Country was a
Dutch reprint of Marco Rota's "The Money Ocean," published as an album.
Though originally an Italian story (which I translated for Disney Comics),
it's evident that the Dutch album version used the American coloring rather
than the Italian (you can see the faint outlines of the words "Money Ocean"
in the coloring of the splash panel). Also...in the translation, I simplified
the explanation somewhat of why Scrooge's business enterprises are experiencing
difficulties as a result of the ocean-sized money bin. Somebody rewrote my
translation for the Disney Comics version, and simplified my explanation
even more. It looks like the Dutch version rewrote the published Disney Comics
version still further, and I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of sense now.
Somebody should have gone back to the original Italian, I think...

--Dwight Decker