DCML digest #825

[Don Rosa]

From: "M.J. Prior" <M.J.Prior at let.rug.nl>
>>>>Anyone who has read some of Don Rosa's stories, may probably have
noticed a device which Don uses to make a skip ahead in time.
Erm, there was a point I wanted to make. Oh yes, it's a lovely story-device
and I sure like it, but I've seen it somewhere before. That is, in the
1985(?)
DC Comics series Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Well, maybe Don hasn't read Watchmen at all, or maybe he has, but didn't
pick up this device from it because he knew it already, for, as I then
realised, it's a movie device.

That's right. I did read and love WATCHMEN, but that's a movie storytelling
device. (A short answer to your long, thoughtful query.)

>>>And another question: the final scene in 'A Little Something Special',
with
Scrooge trying hard to prevent Grandpa Beagle from falling of the giant
Cornelius Coot statue, strongly resembles the final scene of some movie by
Alfred Hitchcock, I believe it was Saboteur (1942), which takes place on
top
of the Statue of Liberty. Err, I think I don't need to put the question
anymore.

You are PRECISELY RIGHT. That is the movie scene I was emulating. It's
perhaps my favorite Hitchcock movie.

>>>>Well, I liked that scene. Has the Coot statue ever before been drawn
with
so much detail and shading? Has it ever before been drawn so
'realistically'?

I drew it a lot and it figured into the plot (hey, that rhymes!) in the
story I just sent in, Gyro Gearloose's 50th anniversary story. The story
also celebrates the 50th anniversary of Barks' creation of Cornelius Coot
and a few other Barks classic ideas. And there was the 50th anniversary
story for the Beagle Boys and the Money Bin I recently did... the Barks
stories of 50 years back were in the most creative and entertaining span of
his career! My mind boggles at all the classic stories in those years!

>>>>>And yet another question to mr. Don Rosa:
Don, is there any particular reason why you didn't give Duckburg a pig
mayor, instead of your dogfaced-man-with-top-hat-and-little-moustache?

Because the mayor I recall the most from my youth was the one I drew, the
dog-face guy. I remember him best from the "Snow Princess" story. I used
him in my first mayoral story ("Fit to be Pied") and I definitely wanted to
use him in the important "A Little Something Special", especially because I
was using a pig-face in another villainous role there on the podium. But I
don't really want to draw the same mayor each time. Thanks for pointing
this out -- if I use a mayor again sometime, I'll elect a pig-face.

>>>You would think Grandpa Beagle preferred something stronger ;)
(Ah, but then, in 1952 he would have been over 110 years old,

Please don't say that out loud! I was well aware of what his age must be if
he were to be so much older than $crooge in Barks' 1880 riverboat flashback
story, and if it were the same character as the Grandpa in "The Money
Well", something Barks surely never bothered to analyze, but a fact that I
wish to "force" to be true. I want Blackheart to still be alive to give
$crooge an aged, but spry, enemy from his earliest years. However, you're
right, Blackheart would need to be at least 110 years old by 1952. Maybe
during his riverboat days he wandered over to the Everglades and sipped
from the fountain of "That's No Fable".

From: Rich Bellacera <xephyr at onemain.com>
>>>>recently released and available at my local bookstore called THE BIG
:LITTLE BOOK OF DISNEY by Monique Peterson.
While there's not a whole lot that is really new in it, there is a familial
link placing Daisy's (possible) brother Fred (?) as the parent of April,
May
& June.  I'm not sure what the source of this claim is though.
Anyhow, here it is for what it's worth.
http://home.onemain.com/~xephyr/special/DuckFam.gif

I checked this address, and I'm dumfounded and perplexed. What a mess!!!
This author has taken the characters off my Duck Family Tree, some named by
Barks and some newly created (out of necessity for the Tree) and named by
me, somehow also gotten the info out of my *private* notes which have never
been printed in any Disney publication (having Ludwig Von Drake married to
Matilda McDuck) and tossed in elements from a few other sources, and
jumbled it all up into a mess. Then pulling one bit of idiocy out of thin
air and having "Mother Goose" (who I think is a human, anyway) being an
ancestor of one character, which is stupid enough, but the ancestor of a
Duck rather than Gus or Gladstone!??? What on earth caused this?
I bet most of it is a result of the author swiping info off of a fansite
like Gilles'. Did anyone ask permission for this, Gilles?