Digest #23

[Don Rosa]

	Well, that digest #22 was all for me. How nize.

	TIME in my stories. I maintain (as more a private bit of knowledge than anything else) that my stories take place in the early-mid... 
sometimes late 50's. However, I am well aware of times that certain things in the background might violate that SLIGHTLY -- and so 
far it has been in the form of satellites in two different stories; the ones in "The Duck Who Fell to Earth" and a Brutopian "Sputnik" 
in "The Curse of Nostrildamus". I always draw them as 1957 style Rooski Sputniks (and in fact called that one same), so I think a 
satellite here and there doesn't violate my time frame. However, OTHER things do, such as there being LOTS of satellites in orbit 
"Duck...Fell...", a weather satellite with a camera being used by a TV weatherman in that same story (the gag wasn't worth it, so I 
shoulda lost that'n), and some reference to a giany hamburger chain a la McDonald's in the second tale I ever did (which I can't recall 
the title of!). 
	And someone suspected the truth: I do not see my stories taking place in chronological order unless they are stated as such in internal 
references. We've been reading reprints for decades -- and that's sorta my whole idea of setting my tales in the 50's... I like to 
imagine them as reprints from the very years when I was reading those comics. Harry is right -- there is a tremendous amount of lil' 
hidden tidbits in the stories; one detail that pinpointed the year a story was taking place was a ledger on page one of "Last Sled 
to Dawson" which read "1954"... and I think I did the same thing with some ledger books in "Cash Flow". As I've said, anyone who 
gets out his history books and follows "The Life of $crooge" chapters closely will be able to tell exactly which year, 1877-1947, 
that each story is taking place. Also, another detail that shows that my stories are out of chronological order (not those "Life of" 
stories, of course - they're IN order) was in my very first comic "The Son of the Sun" where one exhibit in the McDuck show was for 
the treasure of Croesus -- a treasure that $crooge once dreamed of, but never was shown to find. That treasure is perhaps one of the 
MOST famous in history, and I have planned to do the search for it since 1987, but I've yet to get to it. 
	Also, I'd originally imagined that "Return to Plain Awful" took place in 1950, shortly after the original (they were returning those 
chickens)... but I guess I screwed up because (as someone said) I made references to "Son of the Sun" which had to have taken place 
much later, considering all those museum exhibits. Ahhhh, sue me.
	By the way, the early existance of satellites in my tales cannot be explained (in MY eyes) by that story which stated that Duckburg 
was far advanced than the rest of the world -- that tale showed Duckburg as apparantly a city with 23rd century architecture, its own 
space stations, citizens zooming about in mini-rockets --  That's all utter nonsense! That's one of Barks' tales that I regard as a 
dream Donald had after eating pickle-flavored ice-cream, or perhaps it was an episode of that DUCKTALES show that the kids in Duckburg 
watch on TV. Duckburg is a very ordinary, large but not HUGE city in Calisota. (And as for its PRECISE location, you'll need to get 
out your atlas' and compare the coastline of Calisota that I show on a map in part 10.)