Disney-comics digest #778.

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Fri Sep 8 08:47:00 CEST 1995


HARRY:
        The Gilded Man gag seemed "forced" to you? Hey -- if that's the only
gag or reference in that chapter, much less all 12 chapters, that seemed
"forced", then I have done a far better job than I ever dreamed!
        What "Dutch comics newsgroup"? Where is it?

ARTHUR:
        When you see my text in Gladstone's U$ with chapter XI, you'll see
more of this. But the fact that Barks had stated in that very-early use of
$crooge in "Voodoo Hoodoo" that $crooge had commited actual crimes, was one
Barksian fact I'd always thought I'd hafta ignore in the "Lo$". But when the
time came, I decided that very out-of-character act could be exactly what I
needed to base that whole chapter on. Yes -- I think $crooge was too mean in
Africa, too... that's the point of the story, right? And besides, part of
the "fun" of the whole series, for us anal-retentive fanboys is to use every
Barksian fact in the series, whether it fits in well or not. Actually, the
whole challenge of that series was NOT writing a "life story" for $crooge --
that would be easy. It was doing it in such a way as to give mention to each
and every Barksian Fact, ignoring none, and finding a logical way to get
them to inter-relate. As I've also said, I don't know if I came up with a
good story (usually I was SURE I wasn't!), but I think the way I spun all
those "facts" together and mentioned them all was not bad at all.
        And that chapter XI will appear in America as is. The people at
Disney who watch over this stuff are really not bad, as long as the
higher-ups in the corporation who have less interest or knowledge in the
comics are not involved in the decision making. I think the reaction was
that chapter XI would have been nixed as a stand-alone story (and as a
stand-alone story I would agree that it would have had no purpose), but that
its omission at this stage of the game would have loused up the entire (ahem
- award winning) series. So they passed it on.

DANIEL vE:
        I didn't plan to ever do anymore stories set in the 1930-1947 time
frame, so I won't need to worry whether $crooge ever again saw his two
sisters. But if I tell you what I was thinking when I wrote that, I do NOT
think he ever again saw either of his sisters, and that they probably went
away and died or never returned to Duckburg. Sad, eh? I never saw $crooge's
life as a deleriously happy one. I think that last page of "Only a Poor Old
Man" sums it up -- he's learned to live with himself and take pleasure in
his memories, but he also has the bit of self-doubt that you see in that one
panel on that page. Ew... too heavy! This stuff feels way to leaden when you
put it down into words. But that's why I love this cast of characters.
Donald, the happy failure... and $crooge, the worried, never content, success.




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