Signs in Rosa Comics

Dwight Decker deckerd at agcs.com
Tue Dec 6 23:36:02 CET 1994


I noticed Don Rosa expressing some dissatisfaction with Egmont's
handling of background signs in his stories. I don't know if this
is quite the same thing, but when I was in Germany the other week,
I picked up the three available albums collecting his Life of
Scrooge series (two episodes per album); the cover of Volume II
is the Wild West one, with Scrooge on horseback. When Gladstone
ran the cover, the sign in the lower righthand corner said 'PAY
DIRT'. On the German album cover, the sign was simply left blank,
which seems kind of pointless, as it makes the cover meaningless
(that is, the sign is pointing in the direction Scrooge is riding
hellbent for leather). For our foreign friends, I'll add that "pay
dirt" was American miners' slang for "soil containing enough metal,
especially gold, to be profitable to mine," to quote the dictionary.
"Hitting pay dirt" also entered the language as a metaphor for 
achieving success in one's endeavor, so there's a larger meaning to
the sign beyond the strictly literal one. Surely German has something
equivalent, even something as simple as "Ruhm" on the sign ("glory"
or "Erfolg" (success) would have sufficed.
	The albums also reprint shorter, unrelated Duck stories to fill
out the page count. I'd tell Don what the translator did to AR 104
(his story where the Nephews are trying to identify wildlife as a
Woodchuck project and Donald tries to stump them by disguising
Grandma's livestock as increasingly fantastic creatures), but his
screams would break every window in Louisville.
	Still, the albums do have a photo of Don's smiling mug on the
back cover, along with detailed text about his life and goals. It
was kind of odd to pick up a copy of one of the albums in a newsstand
in the Hamburg train station, read the back-cover text, and stumble
across a mention of Byron Erickson, the Egmont editor -- who I had
seen just a few hours earlier in Copenhagen (and whined my way into
having him drive me from the Egmont offices to the Copenhagen train
station). Also, the albums' printing is better than Gladstone's, so
the art comes across nicer. Even some inside jokes were left in, such
as Carl Barks's signature on the check for Scrooge's share of the 
Anaconda mine and the squished Mickey Mouse on the bottom of the
elephant's foot in the Transvaal story.
	For that matter, in Don's "Duck Who Never Was" story, printed in
a special 60th Anniversary of Donald Duck album, the Germans left his
"Mickey Mouse Voodoo Doll" intact in the museum scenes.

--Dwight Decker




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