+Postage Due+Disney-comics digest #119.

[Don Rosa]

COMMENTS TO #119:

	First off, I had another large message "returned" to me as
"undeliverable". These always seem to actually have been delivered and
posted, but I didn't notice for sure if this'n made it. Before I erase
it, did my message come through where, among MANY other things, I was
saying Hi to Mattias?
	Anyway, to Mattias: I think I went into some detail a month or
so ago on the subject of how my "Life and Times of $McD" sticks or does
not stick to Barks. It is IMPOSSIBLE to stick to 100% of everything that
Barks had $crooge do or say about himself. Some is self-contradictory,
some is impossible. But NOT MUCH. Off the top of my head, I think there
were less than 5 total items in old Barks $crooge stories that I had to
ignore. One was the "Magic Hourglass" -- its very existance goes against
everything we hold true about $crooge being a self-made Duck (I also
debunk the notion of the "Lucky" Dime in part XII). Two other stories
that I had to ignore bits of was "The Ghosttown Railroad" and "Voodoo
Hoodoo", mostly in the aspect of DATES -- the flashbacks could not occur
when Barks/$crooge says they do. And another story I ignore details from
is that 10-pager when Barks introduced the Money Bin. The whole idea of
$crooge came to Barks gradually, and when he finally decided he wanted
$crooge to have such a Bin, this is the only way he could introduce it.
I won't go into, again, all the reasons why I'm sure that the way I
introduce it as the first building in Duckburg was the best way to
handle it -- you can judge for yourself when the story is used. But I
show $crooge having it built when he was a billionaire (easilly able to
afford it) in 1902 as the container for the next 50 years of his
money... he starts out with just 8 barrels of coins in the bottom, and
it takes him until about 1942 to fill it to the 99 ft. mark. If he had
all that money in 1952 and no bin to keep it in, where WAS it all? We
can discuss whether or not I handle my $crooge history properly... I'm
sure I don't always. But there's no use trying to tell me that I should
have stuck 100% to Barks' "facts" because that's plain impossible.
Cripes, this history may not end up being very entertaining, but I think
I deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor in the way I sweated blood to
fit ALL the facts about $crooge into one timeline in a logical manner
and made it work! But just wait and read it, and we'll talk about it
later.

	Gladstone did print some posters early on, and they might have
been caught at it and told to pull them off the market. You'll notice
that they later rereleased some after having Barks SIGN them, after
which it sold for $80 -- that way their poster was not in competition
with the $3 posters that Disney had licensed the rights to do to another
company. But whatever the story was on those other posters, Gladstone
CANNOT do posters. People wanted poster versions of the cover to my
"Last Sled to Dawson" story, and Gladstone couldn't produce them at that
point either.

	HARRY FLUKS: the comics arrived! Yes, thank you veddy much!!! I
don't recall, but we must have discussed which ones I already had, as
the ones you sent dovetailed perfectly into the issues I already had,
with no duplication. When I was in Norway last week, I found at the
Egmont office a copy of the newest issue #11 with part 1 of the "Life of
$" thing (part 3 was in #9 -- go figure). Watch out for future issues
for me, right?
	Gosh, it looks like the DONALD DUCK EXTRA has virtually turned
into a Don Rosa publication! Nearly every issue of the past year and a
half has used one of my stories with a new cover for it. (I don't know
why this should please me so much! This is the sort of thing that makes
me slowly realize how much I and others are getting SCREWED by not
receiving the royalties we richly deserve for the use of our work!) But
anyway, I was glad to get these issues. (Maybe I'll use them in 20 or 30
years when I sue the Disney corporation for $30 billion.)
	Anyway, Harry -- I can see now whether there are any issues that
I still need. Can you sometime check your stacks and see if I have work
in the issues that I don't have copies of??? The issues I don't have are
the weekly -- 1991: #3-5,7,8,10,12,13.  1992: #1,2,5-8,11,12.  And      
1993: #8-10. Any Rosa junk in those issues? (I guess not, or you would
have sent them, eh?)
	So... how much do I owe you for all this????