DCML digest #895

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Mon Apr 15 14:35:36 CEST 2002


> From: Arne Voigtmann <ArneVoigtmann at gmx.de>
> When I read Don Rosa's "Forget it!" two weeks ago in No. 15/2002 of the
German "Micky
> Maus" I was especially impressed by the pictures (photos?) of Scrooge
> hanging in his office (e.g. the one where he is hunting for a coin with a
> net). Are these motifs inspired by Barks or did Don Rosa invent them?

Are you asking whether Barks ever had funny pictures hanging on background
walls, or if I copied these *particular* pictures from an old Barks story?
I scribble these pictures as they pop into my head while I'm penciling...
they are not planned in my scripts. I don't think too hard whether I am
subconsciously reusing one that I saw once before, but at the time I'm
thinking they are original, such itty-bitty gags that they are. Of course,
working for Egmont (rather than when I was doing the stuff for Gladstone),
it gets *very* difficult to think of a gag for a picture in $crooge's
office -- there are a thousand little gags that would work if there was a
"$" (or its equivalent) that could appear in the pic... but I can't put one
in because someone would remove it and not bother to replace it with a "Kr"
or a "Mk" or anything else. That explains why many of my older stories in
Egmont editions show that $crooge seems to like to decorate his office with
pictures of lumpy, unidentified bags of... peanuts? Rocks? Who knows? And I
can't put "$"s hovering around what I intend to be a coin. So... you saw
$crooge chasing a coin and praying before a coin? Some readers might wonder
why he's so devoted to pingpong balls. You lose a lot of the finer points of
quality presentation in this sort of system. But you already knew that.
Now... if you're asking if Barks invented this gag of having funny
wall-pictures in the background, that's certainly who *I* got it from in the
comics I grew up with. But they'd been doing it for about 40-50 years before
that in the newspaper strips of Barks' youth, such as "Bringing Up Father",
"Smoky Stover", and others.






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