William Van Horn

[Goofy313g@aol.com]

Sigvald:
>>>I am indeed very sorry that you feel that way about my 
>>>answer, that was *not* my intention at all.

Ok, no problem, sorry for the misunderstanding, Monsieur "Little" Sigvald :-) 
Well, let's not speak about that anymore, and stay good friends, I know it's 
somehow difficult to communicate feelings through a computer...

>>>OK, this is it! This is definitive evidence that William 
>>>Van Horn is *not* as true a successor to Barks as Don 
>>>Rosa. By introducing this so-called half-brother of 
>>>Scrooge in contradiction to Barks, Mr. Van Horn shows that 
>>>he doesn't really accept Barks' universe to the last 
>>>letter.

I don't see why it makes him not a successor, if there'd exist a successor. 
Where is the contradiction?
If it's because of the fact that Barks told that Scrooge was the last McDuck 
alive, then where's the problem? Rumpus is an illegitimate son of Scrooge's dad 
(and probably Downy O'Drake and her sister Vera's cousin), and carries the name McFowl, 
not McDuck! He isn't and doesn't want to be a McDuck. Then, in his first stories, 
he was told to be Scrooge's cousin, not half-brother, and I don't know if Van Horn 
had planned this half brother story from the beginning, but Rumpus didn't know about 
this until he discovered the letter. If it's only about the needing Van Horn had of 
creating new characters to the family Barks used, then we could do the same reproach 
to Don Rosa : remember that Casey Coot is his creation!!! It's not a character he just 
created for the characters of his tree to fit better together, like Molly Mallard, 
Lulubelle Loon, or Gretchen Grebe, Gus Goose could have very well been Grandma's 
daughter's son, as he was in Barks' second sketches of his Duck Family Tree.
If there is a successor to Barks, I don't see why Don Rosa would be this successor 
and not William Van Horn. 
Many people consider that Don Rosa improves too much on Barks' universe... I don't 
see a "too much" here, and I love Don Rosa's work, but to you, what is the biggest 
changing in Barks' universe : giving scrooge an illeligitimate half brother, or making 
Grandma the granddaughter of Cornelius Coot, for instance, or making mentionned, so Van 
Horn acknowledged and respected Don Rosa's continuity. But well, you can still consider 
all this as "universes", and there are as many universes as possible... the Barks universe, 
the Barks/Rosa universe, the Bark/Van Horn universe, why not a Barks/Rosa/Van Horn universe,... 
If you only focus on one universe, for instance the Barks/Rosa one, you'll be kind of 
frustrated, I think, because once you have read all the stories and Whitewater being the 
son of Eider Duck when Barks told Whitewater was a distant cousin, or renaming a bunch of 
characters like Seafoam, Pothole, and Whitewater because he considered their names sounded 
like nicknames,...? 
A funny detail : in his story about Rumpus being in fact Scrooge's halfbrother, the name of 
Fergus McDuck is made all the possible researches, you get a little "bored" (not to be 
considered as an insult to Barks or Rosa), because Barks is dead (so, no new stories), 
and Don Rosa is very slow to create new stories (not an insult either, rather a compliment, 
I prefer cooking one excellent cake and take all day long to do it, than cooking ten cakes 
which taste like crap and taking one hour...), but if you look at every available sources, 
you always discover new stories, or old stories you didn't have, new characters, new 
possibilities, and thousands of constradictions but it's so much fun to compare!

Gilles