Ducks, humans and history

[Søren Krarup Olesen]

Dear all,

Like Theresa and Fabio, I had a good laugh myself reading all these
mails, which circle around a good ol' topic that pops up here on a
regular basis, and I am only happy that it does.

As for the humanization of ducks or the other way around there seems to
be two possibilities:

1) They are ducks that act like humans, or
2) They are humans that look like ducks

To me, the first suggests fantasy while the other one reminds me of
sci-fi horror. I read two mails that perhaps said it all in very short
terms. Vidar said that he didn't care about such details as distances,
since reading Disney comics is about having fun, and a rediculous
distance might in fact be funnier. Secondly, Mads wrote, that he found
this discussion nonsense.

Yes to both IMO. There is an expression "Finding the quadrature of a
circle" in Danish, which possibly exists in other languages as well. I
find it very difficult to apply scientific analytical tools to an
utterly non-existing world/universe as our beloved ducks (mice).

In many mails Sigvald tries to define pseudo facts which are derived
from familiy trees and such, which is perfectly okay, as long as we
don't forget that these ducks and mice were and are continously
developed to fit "today's world" (Stefan brought that up I think), and
as long as we keep in mind, that those are just *suggestions* to what
some family relations may look like.

I think those trees were made for fun. Not in order to cheat anybody,
merely for the fun of it, simply because imagining who is related to
whom is funny. But honestly, don't tell me anything about "fact"; there
are and were too many people involved in writing and drawing Disney
comics over the years, and they didn't have some kinda meeting where
they decided what was right or wrong. Some followed in someone's
footsteps and some used characters previously created by others etc.
There is no "system" as such, so any attempt to squeeze out conclusions
are (as Mads put it) nonsense. However, it's still an interesting topic,
and it will return next year :-)

About the "history" and timing, you know how old is Donald and all that,
this gives us comparable discussions. I like the old stylish stories
myself, with cars from the 50s and old telephones and don't appreciate
so much Egmont's I-Team for example, which involves computers and
cellulars. That's only (old) me, but kids might love them, and they are
just as "real" and "canon" and "true" or whatever quality mark you try
to put on them as any Barks story and as any Rosa story.

Søren

"Humans don't have beaks" [T. Wiegert, 2003]