DCML digest #906

[Francesco Spreafico]

Don Rosa wrote:

> You'll also see some pics of members of this very ML (and I'd expected
to
> see some of them post reports of their own here, but perhaps they
> were busy)

Indeed! I had intended to post a report here right away, but then got
carried away by other matters, so here it is.

I was in Turin on Friday and Saturday (I live 150 miles away). The fair
was quite... fair indeed, not many stands, not many things to buy, but
very nicely hadnles, there was plenty of room, something you generally
don't get at comics fairs here where it's generally even hard to walk.
Unfortunately there was a "greenhouse effect", due to the glass roof,
that had us sweat under the sun all the time, oh well...

On Friday morning I and my friend Francesco Gerbaldo saw Don enter the
press room and almost "get locked" in there. The guy who locked him in
told us (we were at the Anonima Fumetti stand, thereby) "Don't let
anybody in, he's making drawings for the authorities" So we guarded that
door for about an hour then Don was finally thru and at that very moment
Andrea Salimbeti showed up (a Paperinik fan, check the statue of Scrooge
he made for Don! http://digilander.iol.it/Freckles/paperinik/arte.htm
) and Luca Boschi finally arrived, so we all went sit at
a free table (lot of room as I said) as we also had to swap some
comics.... There was also a collector o Scarpa's art, who show us the
original art for "History Re-Petes Itself" and "Funny Carrots".
Wonderful, especially the former.
Suddenly it was 16 o' clock, and Don had the sketch session...
unfortunately we found out that they had been given tickets for it
(smart idea, even though it seems quite "supermarket-y"), and they had
been given with no warnings a couple of hours before. So no sketch for
us!
In the meanwhile ML member Eta Beta joined us and right then (disney
author) Luciano
Gatto arrived (together with his collegue Valerio Held and wife), and we
went to a
bar where he told us a lot of anedocts... we could hardly stop him from
talking actually :-)
We'd showed him a stand selling some original art of his, art he'd lent
14 years ago to someone and that he'd never been given back... he was
quite (and righteously) bothered by this!

This is about all happened on Friday. On Saturday (300 miles after ;-)
still another ML member, Armando Botto joined us, and all in all it's
been a quiter day. In the afternoon there was a conference named "Don
Rosa e il rinascimento disneyano", in which the panelists (Don Rosa,
Luca Boschi, Alberto Becattini, Zio Paperone editor Lidia Cannatella and
Zio Paperone letterer Diego Ceresa) talked about stuff... we all know
very well here in the list :-) but it was nice to hear these things for
one time, rather then read them. By the way, I generally don't read
"spoilers" here in the list and since in Italy we're generally the
last to get Don's stories, it means I have to skip most of the
discussions about them. Still what I heard there about the next story
sounded really _very_ interesting, I'm really looking foward to reading
it!

A special note about the translator... she was good! She did mess some
things up, but just because she was not much into the comic field
probably... not a big problem anyway, kudos to her. (quite fun when she
forgot to translate part of an answer, where Don had stated that Scrooge
is his favourite character, so the question was asked again since it
seemed that no answer had been given :-).

After the conference there was antoher sketch session, this time (On
Don's "orders" we've been told) with no "pre-sale" tickets... tickets
were given at the begininning of the session, so it worked out much
better and I got my sketch after a while (a nice Louie
http://digilander.iol.it/sgrizzo/dcml/Louie.jpg ... since
everybody seemed to be asking Scrooge, or, at best, Donald! Not to
mention a couple of Fethry's :-). I'm a sucker for sketches, and
that's quite silly, I know. I'll refrain next time, now that I've got
one :-)

--
Francesco