translation

[Peter Coenen]

DON:
 Please excuse me that it took me so long to translate this first part of
an article about you and the LO$ comics. It is not that well translated
and I hope that there are not too many mistakes. If you are still
interested, I will continue, and I hope to have the hole text done within
two or three weeks. As soon as I have finished it all, I will send it to
your private address as well as to the list.

Danny Coenen


$cooges Memories-
Don Rosa on the trace of Carl Barks

His style is characteristic- bent on details, he uses the last square
centimeter for a bit more of structure or for one of his typical tiny-
funny sidegags. This makes the eyes remain on those panels, but
somehow it makes them appear in a Disney-unusual stiffness. But to
regard is really worthwhile- Without doubt, Don Rosa likes his job.
And he does it exactly. Rosa is a master of putting humor in his
drawings- and he is more: His stories are perfectly calculated, full of
ideas, absurd constellations and- speed. Just like a well-timed slapstick
comedy. And finally there is the "point of no return" where all the
humor is coming out with the power of an avalanche.
There are probably two reasons for Rosa being called the heir of Carl
Barks: On the one hand there is his incomparable style, and on the
other hand-like being mad- he takes on elements out of the duckman's
stories. Today the stories of all duck artists base on Carl Bark's work,
but Rosa is the only real successor of him. He takes up the characters
as well as the action and the places his idol Carl Barks invented. For
example he took his ducks back to Tralla La or to the land of the
square eggs. Rosa does not add new things- he completes. And so the
ducks get something like a memory, "real" life: a biography.
Biographic elements have also been used in Bark's stories. Especially
$crooge often told of his origin and of his life before he became the
world's richest duck.  And that was necessary, because that was how
he has been developed by Carl Barks:  more or less close by  and out of
nothing- although adapted to Dickens; from there his name Scrooge
McDuck- for the "Christmas on Bear Mountain" story (FC 178). Later
some explanations became necessary, but they have often been very
vague. Only once in a while there have been exiting stories basing on
$crooges past, but those belong to the best Barks ever wrote. The
most famous are "The Old Castles Secret" (FC 189) and "Back to the
Klondike" (FC 456). But $crooges memories remain incomplete and
symtomatically indistinct.
Thus a challenge for Rosa- and what a hard work! It took him two and
a half years to investigate,  assort and  to translate this into a  resolved
comic story. And what a story: on 211 pages divided into 12 chapters
it describes the Life of $crooge McDuck.