Disney-comics digest #545.

[DAVID.A.GERSTEIN]

      Last letter today (and from now on, there'll be only one letter 
from me every day...)

      "Lydia" song in Croesus story
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      Doggone it!  My favorite song from an old film ends up in a 
Rosa story, and we run into copyright problems!  Well, I'll find out 
soon who owns the song, since back at home I have a recent 
publication of the music to it.  Maybe Gladstone could buy the rights 
to use the lyrics for a trifle.  But -- >sigh!< -- maybe not.

      The Lentils from Babylon  (SPOILERS!)
      === ======= ==== =======
      Part II of this story has now been published, as we've noted.  
Please accept my apologies that some of the panels are a little 
wordy;  when I have a huge space in a panel to put dialogue (due to 
the large size Scarpa lettered his stories), I end up running off at 
the mouth now and then.  But anyway, I needed most of the extra 
dialogue so that the Ducks could seem sympathetic to the way the 
Beagle Boys were swindling the third-world country of Paylesh.  In 
the original story, they didn't care about the poverty-stricken 
country losing its only valuable resource.  I didn't want Disney to 
do the rewriting for me, so I did it.

      (END OF SPOILERS)

      On the other hand, Disney hardly looked at my dialoguing job... 
since it's almost exactly as I wrote it.  About all that got the 
heave was a reference to a gag smoke bomb as a "Johnson Smith."  J+S 
was a joke company that was very successful in the 1930s and 1940s, 
which I learned about in the writings of humorist Gene Shepard.  I 
guess the company must still exist, in which case using the name 
would constitute a free advertisement.
      This is the first-ever Scrooge comic (save non-canonical 
DUCKTALES issues) which contained part of a Scrooge story, but not 
the end or beginning.

      Back to word count per panel for a moment:  can some of you 
tell me if you agree that this Lentil story is a little too wordy?  
I'm doing another Scarpa right now, and I don't want to make the same 
mistake twice.  But if you like the amount of words in "Lentils from 
Babylon" I can add a few to... "Colossus of the Nile."

      Best,
      David Gerstein
      <9475609 at arran.sms.ed.ac.uk>