Disney-comics digest #266.

Don Rosa 72260.2635 at CompuServe.COM
Sat Mar 12 06:49:34 CET 1994


DAVID:
	I checked WDC&S #2 & 3 with no luck. So I checked #1, and there
was the DD strip in question! (What made you think it was in #2 or 3?)
	You're pretty darn slick, you little rascal! You were RIGHT!
Well, of course, no Disney comic strip even in 1939 or wotever would use
the word "nigger"; I did see that in an old comic book once -- it's on
the back cover of my SUPERMAN #4 where there's an ad for some
fireworks-by-mail, one of which is called a "niggerchaser" (which
conjurs up quite an amusing thought using 1930's eyes). But you were
close enough -- the sign on the circus sideshow booth said "AFRICAN
DODGER - 3 balls, 5 cents" The meaning is clear, eh? They didn't mean a
Boer.

MATTIAS:
	(I guess I should say "SPOILER WARNING", though I don't knowif
any of this will really ruin the reading of LOS #10 for Americans. I
mean, Gladstone won't get to this chapter for 1 1/2 years, and you won't
remember any of this by then!)
	 The Gearloose-lookin' Junior Woodchuck in Lo$ #10 was (in my
script) Fulton Gearloose, who would be Ratchet's son and Gyro's father.
In fact, you'll see a reference to Fulton in the Junior Woodchuck
museum in the opening of "tGotLL" (at least in my script) in a display
showing the "first Junior Woodchuck medal awarded to Fulton Gearloose
for inventing the first Junior Woodchuck Medal".
	And you know, when I look at Fulton I ALSO think of Stefan...
but he wasn't meant to look like Stefan. Yet you realize WHY he reminds
us of Stefan, right? It's that tall, thin form wearing a raccoon cap as
Stefan does at comic shows and such (or all the time, for all I know).
	I've decided I'll redraw those central battleships when
Gladstone reprints this chapter. I have lotsa time since they won't get
close to it until August 1995! The battleships were drawn with great
pains to make them accurate to 1902, and I was happy to see the
colorists in Europe go to the trouble of following my coloring
directions (American battleships were lovely colors in those days)...
but I was so carried away with the authenticity that I forgot that the
ships were being viewed from atop a tall hill! I drew them as if viewed
from sea-level. Notice the ships at the sides are drawn with at least
the proper perspective. 
	You're also right that the female Duck's tails look odd poking
around under their dresses, but I think the main reason they do is
because of my inability to not use so many wrinkles and shadows on the
fabric! It looks ugly. But my reason for drawing them thus was the idea
that these stories take place during Victorian times and I thought that
surely in those days the girl Ducks would cover their tails. When I draw
them in chapter 12 circa 1930, perhaps I should have poked their tails
out of their dresses, but then they are pretty old by then...in their
late 50s... and they'd probably still be dressing in an old fashioned
style.
	The Beagle Boys were fun to use in chapter 10, yet you know that
those were still not the "real" BB, right? The current BB don't appear
until the big finish in chapter 12 when Blackheart Beagle introduces
them to a feeble and aged $crooge. We don't need to argue anymore about
when the Money Bin was built -- when you read chapter 12 you'll need to
deal with a new idea yet: that nobody in Duckburg KNEW that was a "Money
Bin" until 10 years after $crooge retires and closed down his
businesses, at which point the long abandonned (but guarded) Bin is
thought to be simply a warehouse of business ledgers. I further violate
the Barks story you wish to preserve... the one where $crooge is "first"
showing the Bin interior to DD & HDL... when I show that scene happening
in 1947.
	And Teddy Roosevelt is GREAT fun in a comic story! I'd like to
find a way to team him up with $crooge again when I someday go back and
do more "untold stories" of $crooge's early years.




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