Point not taken...

[Dan Shane]

MATT WRITES:

> Let me clarify myself even further (Matt's face is turning an unpleasant
> shade of red)!  While most of the great legendary characters began from a
> loose oral tradition, by the time we reached the late nineteenth and early
> twentieth centuries, scholars and publishers had agreed somewhat on what
> stories were cannon and what stories weren't.  SO there was something of
> an
> official version for a little while.  Yes?  At any rate, even if you
> disagree with me here, your point would prove my earlier point that the
> ducks are certainly not analogous to the classic characters of legend.

AND I REPLY:

It may prove the point to you (and that's fine, since the whole topic we're
discussing is purely subjective), but to me it proves just the opposite.
Because classic literary characters are often amalgams of loosely woven oral
traditions, it means that people have taken often disjointed tales and
pieced them together to create a sensible narrative.

How is that different than what Don has done with the pretty much standalone
tales of Barks (and in one case, Strobl) -- flexing and joining the
disparate "facts" (whether "literally" lived by Scrooge or simply "imagined"
by his tale-tale mind) into a cohesive epic?  ROBIN HOOD AND HIS MERRY MEN
and LE MORTE D'ARTHUR make for ripping yarns as a whole, but it is easy to
see the seams of the oral tales without looking very hard.  And it isn't
difficult for others to pull at those seams to make all new episodes of
"in-between" stories in much the same way Don writes his Episode 10b, etc.
fill-ins.

But as I said above, you're wholly correct to view the Duck timeline
differently.  It's YOUR timeline!  It's just that it doesn't run parallel to
mine.

Dan