Birthdays

[Gary Leach]

We celebrate anniversaries because we are fascinated with the counting 
game - we like to have a sense of how long something/someone has been 
around. And in the case of Mickey, Donald, Scrooge, and all their 
fictional colleagues, we like to think that, having been around so 
long, they're significant, they're important, they really do matter.

And do they? To us, yeah, of course. Silly question. But then, when do 
we say that Uncle Scrooge, for instance, was born? That's easy: on the 
publication of "Christmas on Bear Mountain." Why is that easy? Because 
prior to that Scrooge was a conception, nothing more - he had not yet 
fully emerged from the creative process. And make no mistake, the 
creative process that resulted in Scrooge gives "birth" on one 
occasion, and one occasion only - the date of publication. At any point 
prior to that Scrooge could have vanished and not one of us would have 
ever been the wiser. Even Barks would have probably forgotten he ever 
had such a notion.

Gary