I have to agree with Francesco on this translating issue. When I was younger, I used to enjoy the cross-references to Barks and Rosa stories that David Gerstein and Geoffrey Blum would toss into their translations of European stories, and the various literary allusions, but now I dislike it on principle. I think the tendency to regard European stories as a blank slate for a translator to write on is a bad one, no matter how good the Americanized dialogue might be. For instance, I got several laughs out of David Gerstein's scripting of The Delta Dimension, particularly the Scarlet Pimpernel reference, but I always had the nagging thought at the back of my mind that such allusions were probably not in the author's original script. I particularly was bothered by David's insertion of his own "Mickey dialect" into the Mouse's dialogue, and by what seemed to me attempts to make Scarpa's Mickey conform to his own ideas of the hesitant, indecisive Mickey (one thing I like about Scarpa's Mickey in other stories is that he's determined and resourceful but never boring)--I'm thinking especially of Mickey telling Bleep-Bleep to "Attack th' raygun--whatever works!" 
Geoff Blum is probably responsible for starting this trend, but I don't think it was quite as reprehensible for him to "punch up" stories by anonymous Egmont staff writers (as he generally did during Gladstone's first run) as it is for Markstein, Gerstein, Gray, and others to tweak the stories of a genius like Scarpa. The Scarpa translations in Gladstone's first run, by Byron Erickson, Dwight Decker, and others, seemed to me to do a much better job of "Americanizing" the dialogue while leaving the translators' personalities out of it. A translator should be seen and not heard.
I don't think of comics as just "casual entertainment," as Donald Markstein seems to--they're literature of a type, and when foreign literature is translated it should be treated respectfully. I wouldn't like it if someone decided to insert contemporary references into Dante or Edmond Rostand to make them more "entertaining," and I don't like to see the same thing done to Scarpa. In addition, references to stuff like Bill Clinton's cat will make the American translation just as badly dated as the Italian original may or may not have been in years to come--is Markstein suggesting that we re-dialogue Scarpa's stories with every reprinting in order to keep bringing them up to date? No one would ever suggest doing such a thing with Barks, Herriman, Roy Crane, or other American comics geniuses, so why should we do it with European comic geniuses? I suppose this makes me a "musty old antiquary," but I prefer to think that I just happen to have some respect for creative independence. Translators, no matter how talented they might be as writers, are mere moving men when they're translating stories, and they shouldn't tweak the work of art they're transporting at the expense of its creator. 
