Uncle Anders

[Fluks, H.W.]

Anders to Sprea:

> > a[n] "uncle"
> > can hardly be brother of a "grandma" :-)
> You're right.

Funny you say that, since only a few lines later you write:

> uncle is also just the distant re[la]tive that you can't call
> anything else than uncle.

...like the brother of a grandma!

Donald calls his mother Grandma because she's the grandma of the children.
And he calls his uncle Scrooge an uncle. The kids do too, because of lack of
a better name.

This makes perfectly sense. And this has been the "canon" in the Dutch
Disney comics for years. Marco Rota's "From Egg to Duck" story (1984)
confirmed that view.

And then came Don Rosa, who reminded us of a Barks story named "Donald's
Grandma Duck", and a family tree that Barks once sketched. This was quite
confusing, both to the Dutch editors and to Dutch DCML mailing list members:
see our discussions here in 1994 or so!

Anyway, Scrooge and Grandma being unrelated (the Barks/Rosa way) seems to be
the most sensible view, but the other possibility (siblings, the Rota way)
can be defended too.

--Harry.