conventions; Grandey

[Wilmer Rivers]

Hi Don, welcome back!  I'm relieved to see that you returned from
the Grand Canyon in one piece - I was worried that you might fall
over the edge, during one of your infamous drunken tirades.  :-)

I see from the ads in CBG that you will be one of the artists at
the big comics show in Chicago in a couple of weeks.  Since you
said after the Oakland show that you were swearing off these things
(in the USA, that is), are you just honoring an earlier commitment
or are you re-considering?  If it's the former, then will this be
the last chance for American audiences to meet you?  And since
Barks isn't among the guests, who is it that you're stalking there?
Is it Guest-of-Honor Harlan Ellison, who had dinner with Barks in
Atlanta, making him the next-in-line as target for your hostility?

And speaking (indirectly) of Mr. Grandey...  It's really hard to
comment on something as dumbfounding as this incident.  When a
deranged person runs up to you in the street and shouts that Bill
Clinton is really the illegimate offspring of Emperor Ming and
Mother Theresa, about all you can do is say, "Oh, so?"  It's tempting
to do the same with Grandey's behavior, but I'm glad that you're not
doing that.  Somebody has to respond to Grandey, and even though on
this list we're all lurking in astonished silence, we're glad to see
you take him to task.  His trying to insure that no publishers
wishing to meet with Barks could do so if they also met with you
certainly does smack of restraint of trade.  The US courts have made
it clear that IBM can't refuse to sell its computers to a company that
chooses to purchase some other computers from DEC, and it seems that
what Grandey was doing borders on being that sort of action.  As for
the pans of your work that he's planting in the press, some are really
hard to swallow, as in the Barks interview you mentioned:

"There has been a great deal of confusion lately about a recent
misinterpreted history of Scrooge. I (Barks) get calls all the time from
child psychologist calling to complain about the first chapter. In it a
young Scrooge is manipulated and tricked into working hard for his
money. I remind them that this is a non-Barks Uncle Scrooge. The author
just doesn't know Scrooge."

This is just too, too much.  First of all, are we really to believe
that child psychologists are worried about the effects on the young of
Uncle Scrooge stories, given that 98% of all the comics in a typical
US store are filled with super-"heroes" disembowelling their enemies
(or random strangers, just for the heck of it)?  Second, why would
they complain to Carl Barks - in the remotely unlikely circumstance
that they know who he is, then they also know that he didn't write
that story!  Finally, why should they complain that Scrooge was tricked
and learned a valuable lesson; didn't that happen to Donald a lot in
Barks's stories?  (Except that, of course, Donald never did learn from
his mistakes.)  The young Scrooge doesn't say, "I've learned that to
get ahead in this world, you should use manipulation and trickery!"
It was just the opposite; of course, this is exactly what Grandey
probably took to be the moral of the story, given his own world view
of how to succeed in business.

Finally, I was interested to learn from your posting that Grandey used
to be a soap salesman.  With that in mind, I shall now have to re-read
that story (illustrated by Van Horn!) in which Donald sells "collect-
able" bars of soap.  In that parody of comics-collecting craziness,
Scrooge finally beats out Donald by ignoring the marketing nonsense
about packaging, advertising hype, and collectable value, choosing 
instead to concentrate on the quality of the actual product, namely
the soap itself.  Hooray for Scrooge!  Let it be so in the world of
comics as in the world of soap, and soon!  Maybe your lawsuit can help
get things started...

Wilmer Rivers