Rosa stories ?

Ole R Nielsen oleroc at tdcspace.dk
Thu Feb 19 04:43:59 CET 2004


Mads Jensen wrote:

>Furthermore Blum mentions "Ghast Gow" as the first thing he ever saw by 
>Rosa, but the interview doesn't mention it any further. But according to 
>Blum, the reason why it was rejected was that it was built too much over 
>an old classic (which could only be by Barks, in this contents, I 
>believe ? :-))

As discussed in DCML mails at the time the interview was published,
it is assumed that the story in question is "Cash Flow". It may have
been seen as too close to the most classic of all Scrooge stories,
"Only A Poor Old Man" with the money lake.

This and another reference to a story called "The Square X" (aka
"Return to Plain Awful") suggests that the cause of the confusion
is the the transcriber of the interview tapes (Steffen Kronborg or
possibly Thomas Berger) and not Geoffrey Blum .

Aristotle wrote about the Four Basic Stories...
Steffen Kronborg also happens to be the author of a number of articles
collected in two books, where he convincingly argues that the deeper
theme of Barks's stories is a Man vs. Nature conflict, which always
ends with the defeat of Man (our duck friends).

It is an interesting perspective on the morals taught by our beloved
writer gaining credibility by the knowledge of his own preference to
western lore for entertainment and the strongly eco-aware Junior
Woodchucks stories of his post-retirement age.

So, I wonder: What is it we Barks fans think we have learned from
his stories? Barks himself would of course say that he only wrote
to entertain with funny stories about those zany ducks. But his own
ideas would of course unconsciously flow through the pen and give
that deeper significance to his stories which makes them so special.

I think that one sentiment which resonates with many of us fans
today is that Barks at the apogee of his career was an elderly man,
solidly rootet in values and ideas of the start of the 20th century.
Isolated from the time stream he could with a language already
then quaint and oldfashioned make satire of his present and its
obsession with the promises of the future.

But how strange it is as a modern nostalgic to think of the man we'd
easily describe the most popular comic book artist of the 1950es -
wishing he'd be back in the days when the West was still wild and
tycoons made their fortune prospecting for oil or gold or raising cattle,
instead of licensing the likeness of a rodent to subcontractors.

-- Ole





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