Scans, Taliaferro, Barks in France

Olivier mouse-ducks at wanadoo.fr
Wed Apr 18 20:25:14 CEST 2001


Wow! What a bunch of mail today!
And it keeps pouring in too!

Don:
>>Get newer software! Most graphics software nowadays allows you to rotate the
>>image in fractions of a degree, so you can straighten it out without taking
>>the time to re-scan it.

I'm using Paint Shop Pro (v7). I've tried the rotate thing already, but it invariably adds
a blur to the image.

>>As for cleaning up the images -- [...] Everything else -- brightening it
>>up, adjusting the contrast, de-specking, etc. -- is something YOU add.

Sorry, can't help it: I just can't give a way a scan when I know I can make it clearer.

>>Fuzzy dark gray and yellowish white are fine -- I can clean them up myself
>>easily enough, if I want to.

Ah, but I *love* doing it !  : )   (seriously)



Melanie:
>>I guess you probably already know Favio's great
>>website about Al Taliaferro at:
>>http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Cinema/9080/

Yep, I do. But thanks anyway, Melanie.
I've been wondering. Are there many female members? Some mailing names
(like mine) don't help telling.



Thierry:
>>Most of the time they refered to Barks as "The *real* father of Donald"
>>which is a statement I can't disagree with

Well, how *can* you *agree* with it?
Bruce Hamilton wrote something on the subject in the DD special 60th Anniversary issue
(DD 286, Sept '94), "Will the First Donald Duck Please Stand Up?".
Barks did a great job fleshing out the character.
But what about Taliaffero? Even his Donald remains a slapstick comic character,
he did a great job too.
So Barks made Donald the *comic book* Donald that we know.
But he did not *invent* the character from scratch as he did Uncle Scrooge, Gladstone, Gyro, ...
French people I think mostly know the *cartoon* Donald and the Donald of  Le Journal de Mickey
et al, which is sometimes Barks', but more often other authors'.
(For a couple of  years now PM has been printing mostly Barks; I'm thinking of  the issues
our generation read).
Why did the media (I should have specified I'm talking of  TV news) say it was Barks
who created Donald rather than Disney? As is very often the case, I think they simply
botched the job: they must have thumbed through a few books, visited a coupla sites
(all mostly in English & other unknown foreign languages), seen ducks everywhere and conluded:
"the guy must have created Donald Duck". They obviously never bothered to ask a specialist
like their Norwegian colleagues did-- or if  they did, they only listened / rememberd half  of  it.
And how can they have possibly overseen the fact *he* created *Scrooge*, who really is
such a powerful & well-known icon?! Hardly anyone knows the stories, especially Barks',
but everyone here knows the character and (think they know) who he is and what he stands for.



Olivier




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