Disney-comics digest #722.

[Don Rosa]

>WES:
        If you're gonna be a $crooge collector, you'll need to brace
yourself for American licensees and even people at Disney (as in your
experience) not having any idea who $crooge McDuck is. I just grudgingly
bought a $crooge desk clock that had an appealing shape of a stack of coins
with the top coin looking like a round vault door, which when swung back
reveals a clock with a picture of $crooge; it would be a decent piece, but
it's not "the" $crooge, it's a shot from Disney's "$crooge McDuck and Money"
cartoon where it's not so much $crooge as a reshaped Ludwig Von Drake. There
used to be a "collectibles" (ecch) catalogue that showed up in my mailbox
which, especially during the "DuckTales" and "Mickey's Xmas Carol" scare a
few years ago, would often have bad $crooge items for sale. But the problem
that irked me was that each $crooge item was described in the text as
"Donald Duck as Uncle $crooge" -- this was either ignorance on the part of
the catalogue company, or their fear that buyers in search of cute Disney
characters for their collections would not recognize who this obscure
"$crooge McDuck" was, and were seeking to persuade the Disney-o-philes to
buy the things.

MIKE:
        The Finnish issues are billing "ODaDaD" as "fresh" Rosa art? They
have no way of knowing I did that story 4 years ago.
        I don't have a copy of a Euro printing of that tale where I sit now,
so I'm not sure what I may have drawn wrong about Magica's chest. I usually
put extra work into doing Magica's chest. Also Glittering Goldie's. Nudge,
nudge, say no more, say no more.
        Neither am I sure what you mean about the candle. I seem to recall
that I had the candle burning down a set distance page by page, regardless
of the amount of time that was supposed to be passing -- I was using the
candle more as a visual gimmick than a real measurement of time passed. But
Byron said I should shorten the candle more than normal at some point. Or
after 4 years, I may be remembering that story backwards... that Byron
suggested I eliminate the one "leap" in the amount of candle meltation. I
can't recall. Does that sound like the problem you're referring to?
        I always pictured $crooge, no matter how young, as having white
hair. I see ALL male Ducks as having white hair. It never even dawned on me
that colorists, just trying to do their colorful best, would color $crooge's
hair brown or something, otherwise I would have put a margin-note pleading
that they not do so. It jars me seeing young $crooge with colored hair, but
maybe that's just because I wasn't expecting it -- probably the casual
readers don't care either way?
        Why didn't $crooge's father, in "Lo$" part 1, see Magica? Especially
since I did that story immediately AFTER just doing "ODaDaD"? Because I want
to imagine that once Magica set history back the way it was supposed to be,
then her involvement in it sort of never happened. I don't like the idea
that Magica put that coin in young $crooge's hand, but it made for a nifty
story. One can say anything one wants to when dealing with the silly paradox
of time travel -- it will work however you want it to for your own
convenience. So Fergus didn't see Magica put the coin into $crooge's hand
because she didn't. The ditchdigger did.
        Are you asking me for advice on how to do a comic script? You'd be
better off checking with someone who knows how to deal with lots of editors
and has made a study of how professionals do this sort of thing. I'm not a
writer who is describing a story to a art team -- I don't need to describe
to myself what I already know. But I don't see how you could go far wrong if
you do your scripts as mock-up comic pages as I do. You can do scribbles or
stick-figures to show the lay-outs or action or expressions you have in
mind... and you don't need to be able to draw to do that much.
        I don't know how to tell you to get over the feeling that you
shouldn't do a story because you don't think it could ever measure up to
what somebody else had done. People always asked me how I had the guts to
take on Barks' characters. This puzzled me since I never considered I was
going where angels feared to tred. I never thought I'd ever do popular
work... I just wanted to realize my dream of writing and drawing Duck
stories, whether anyone liked them or not. I'm still amazed that my stuff is
so popular -- if I went into it all EXPECTING or INTENDING it to be popular,
I guess that WOULD have been frightening. Failure never worried me... maybe
that's the difference? I still know that, despite my current popularity,
I'll never be 1/100th as much a legend as Barks, so I can never be disappointed.
        But if you need to judge yourself by what you see already in print,
don't look at Barks, look at the normal Egmont stuff. We only get the very
BEST Egmont stories here in Gladstones in America -- some of it is nice, but
lots of it is pretty dreadful. It's hard to imagine how dreadful some of the
stuff is that we never even see over here. You KNOW you can do better than
that stuff, right? Go ahead then!