DCML digest #1060

[Don Rosa]

From: Kriton Kyrimis <kyrimis at cti.gr>
>>>DON said about "The Lost Charts of Columbus" (translated back to
English):
(blah blah blah)
>>>There may be an even older traveler who reached America from
Europe:

Oh, yes, there is no lack of historians claiming pre-Columbian European
visitors to America. And I wouldn't be surprised if most of them were not
completely true! These explorers (and windblown sailors) had no idea what
they had stumbled upon, and they had no reliable method for recording proof
of their trip or any reason to try.
In doing research for my latest story, I have come across entire books
written about another voyage to America that I did not even find in my
research while doing the "Lost Charts..." story. A Scot named William
Sinclair with an Italian navigator named Zeno and a small fleet seem to have
sailed to the same area of North America as Leif Erickson settled, following
the same route, and established their own "lost colonies" in Nova Scotia and
Rhode Island (I think it was -- I don't have my notes here) in 1398. There
is even a round stone lighthouse that has always been a landmark in Rhode
Island that was there when the first colonists arrived (but nobody made a
big deal about it at the time since they weren't especially interested in
such things). Apparently there is a detailed log of the entire voyage with
every detail of the trip and the colony recorded. The only reason it has
never been an accepted fact is that the existing log is a COPY of the
original, which is lost. But the people who believe in this story site the
fact that even though the book is written around 1500, it still contains
accurate details that were not known at that time of a part of America that
had yet to be "discovered". There are history books that nowadays tell of
this 1398 voyage as if it is accepted fact, and don't even bother to
question it.
I am a big fan of the "Age of Exploration" and pre-Columbian voyages to
these
shores -- but none of these tales takes any credit away from my boy Columbus
since, even if he wasn't first and even if he didn't know where he was, he
was the only guy who did it properly so that somebody noticed. And even
Columbus was almost forgotten and ignored until a resurgence in interest in
his life occurred about a century after he died. Even his trip to America
was
almost lost to history.

 From: lgiver at postoffice.pacbell.net
Subject: Don Rosa's Sequels for Gladstone
>>>But Don's first story, "Son of the Sun (AR102)" was first published
by Gladstone in US219 in 1987; it was a sequel to US26 "Prize of Pizarro"
and was full of Barks references.  It was a tremendous success, and
there were 5 other sequel stories (AR103, 106, 113, 125, and 130) in
the next 2 years during Gladstone's first run up through 1989.
These were "Nobody's Business" sequel to C&S155 "Some Heir over the
Rainbow";
"Cash Flow" sequel to US8 "Message from Mysterious Island";
"Last Sled to Dawson" sequel to "Back to the Klondike" and US59 "North of
the Yukon"; "Crockodile Collector" sequel to "Trail of the Unicorn"; and
"Return to Plain Awful" sequel to "Lost in the Andes".  These were all
tremendous sequel stories, but I still like "Return to Xanadu" the best.

I see that my buddy Kriton has saved me some work and already explained your
error in perception. These were not "sequels"... they did not require
familiarity with the original stories you mention for the new story to
function. They merely contained references to earlier tales just for fun or
as an homage. The only story I did for Gladstone that was a sequel was
"Return to Plain Awful" and (as I've explained before) the editor allowed me
to do a previously-forbidden sequel in this case only because Another
Rainbow needed a comic to accompany the Barks litho that showed $crooge
entering Plain Awful (since he was not in Barks' "Lost in the Andes"). I was
told that many litho buyers were investors rather than Barks fans and had
never read "Lost in the Andes" and would have been quite puzzled by the
square chicken. It was not a self-explanatory scene of $crooge in the Money
Bin or like that.
And I assume we know that "Return to Xanadu" was done for Europe, not
Gladstone. The European editors *wanted* sequels... their readers had been
requesting them for years.