Florence + Horst

[Stefan Diös]

A little late, as usual, but about some recent discussions:

When doing the Swedish text for "World Wide Witch" a couple of years ago, I 
corresponded with Geoffrey Blum and received much help from him. One 
question I asked him was about Miss Typefast/Quackfaster's first name, much 
the same as people have been wondering recently on this list.

I hope it's not a serious breach of privacy when I tell you that Blum, 
predictably, answered that he freely invented a name for her, knowing that 
Barks never used any. When I told him that we had used another first name 
previously in stories by Don Rosa, he said that was fine and recommended me 
to keep using the same name that we already had, in an effort to keep our 
Swedish Duck universe somewhat consistent. (Which is obviously what I would 
have done anyway, by the same reasoning, unless Blum had given me a very 
good reason why another name should be used. And if Blum's story had 
appeared before Rosa's, I'm sure I would have asked Rosa the same thing, 
hoping to keep the name that was already in use.)

My personal assumption is that Blum, being a Barks scholar, wants to keep 
the "facts" in his stories as much in the Barks tradition as possible, but 
is less interested in keeping touch with every little detail that other 
writers might have contributed later. This is also, by the way, very much 
like I assume that Don Rosa generally is working. So we shouldn't expect 
either of these fine writers to always be completely consistent with each 
other, nor with all of the many other fine writers and artists who all have 
made their personal interpretation of the Barks ducks. In fact, I was more 
surprised that the editor at Egmont didn't make this change 
(Florence/Emily) in the first place, since I believe that both writers' 
stories usually are edited by the same person. However, it's very easy to 
overlook minor details like this one, which now has evidently made its way 
even into the American publishing of the story.

I might add that "World Wide Witch" probably made me work harder and took 
me  longer to finish than any other comic ever, possibly with the exception 
of some Rosa stories. However different in style and personality, Geoff 
Blum and Don Rosa may be the two writers I like and respect the most, not 
the least from having had the good fortune to meet them both on a number of 
occasions.

Finally, even though it already has been mentioned, Horst Schröder is a 
native German who took his literature degree in Frankfurt, but has been 
living and working in Sweden since 1969. Although not as active nowadays, 
he was widely distinguished for 20 years or more as Sweden's foremost 
expert on comics, heavily involved in the business as a fan, collector, 
dealer, author, and publisher - and a very recognizable character, at that.

I don't know about his citizenship, but I consider him fully qualified as a 
Swede. Still, when I knew him in the 80's, we used to poke fun at his 
accent and writing style - all in good, friendly humor, of course. And I 
also find it funny that Cord jokingly referred to him as a "double spy" 
some digests ago. It was a well-known fact among Swedish Donaldists that 
Horst looked exactly like the "Down with America" spy in Barks' ski-race 
story (WDC #114).

Sorry for rambling. If I have misunderstood something given out as a fact 
above, I hope that somebody can correct me. Just don't try to make me 
retract the spy issue!


Stefan Dios
Malmo, Sweden