Disney-comics digest #282.

[Don Rosa]

JACK CHALKER'S "INFORMAL BIOGRAPHY OF $CROOGE McDUCK":
	I certainly have this lil' booklet. And, asamatterafack, the
cover artist, Ron Miller< was visiting me last week and signed my copy.
	The booklet is both a help and a hindrance. Jack did exactly
what I did -- take all the Barksian "facts" and construct a biography.
But what I used his book for were the footnotes. It was invaluable in
telling me in which stories were found all those many, many "facts",
which I then dug out, made notes on, and proceeded to construct my own
history, regardless of Jack's. The HINDRANCE comes from the very
puzzling fact that, even though Chalkers makes it quite clear that he
only uses Barks' stories as a source for his info, this is actually not
true at all! He uses ANY story that appears in U$ #1-71, regardless of
who wrote or drew the tale. I can't figure this out, but that's the
case. So I needed to weed out his many "FALSE facts". He also seemed to
ignore lots of stuff that did NOT happen to appear in U$ comics. One
might guess that he had the idea that the only $crooge stories that
Barks did were those in U$, and that someone had told him that Barks
wrote everything in the first 71 issues (though I assume he could see
there were different artists). I know the guy must have known better
than this, so I can't guess what was really going on here.
	But I DO always have my Chalkers book near at hand, if only to
use the footnotes.
	The other book that is never more than a foor from my elbow is
Mark Worden's similarly sized complete Barks index. It is SO much
handier than any other because it is simply an index and is
handbook-sized. I've never seen (nor really could there BE) a better
Barks handbook.

	And is someone saying that Dwight Decker is here???