Oppfinnar-Jocke "Johansson"?

[Stefan Diös]

Timo:

>Oppfinnar-Jocke is Gyro Gearloose in Swedish. I read from Who's who that 
>his whole Swedish, "real" name is Joakim Johansson. Is this name mentioned 
>in some translations of Barks' stories? Who has invented this name?


Uh... Who's what? I mean, where did you find this interesting information? 
We thought Joachim Johansson was a tennis player!

But I'll try to answer. In Gyro's earliest Swedish appearances, starting 
with the January, 1953, issue of the (then monthly) Kalle Anka & C:o 
magazine, he is alternately called things like "Uppfinnar-Jocke", 
"uppfinnare Johansson", or "herr Johansson" - "uppfinnare" meaning 
"inventor" and "herr" meaning "Mister". It's obvious from these stories, 
translated by Axel Norbeck, that his name is intended to be "Jocke 
Johansson". This name, incidentally, contains no gag attempt at all. 
Johansson is the most common surname in Sweden, and Jocke is similarly a 
common male name. Indeed, it's usually a shortened, informal form of the 
name Joakim/Joachim - we might pick DCML member Joakim Gunnarsson as a 
prominent example!

Yet, to my knowledge, it has never been stated in any comic that this is 
the case with the Swedish Gyro. For all we know, he's called Jocke and 
that's that. Of course it's possible that his real name is (or was) Joakim, 
although he doesn't use it anymore. So, either there is some obscure 
mention of "Joakim Johansson" somewhere that I'm not aware of, or the 
writer of that article made it up as a "reasonable assumption". After all, 
there is already a major character (Uncle Scrooge) waddling around in the 
Swedish Ankeborg with the name Joakim, so who can blame Mr. Johansson if he 
wants to avoid confusion?

Very soon, Jocke dropped the use of his last name altogether, letting his 
nickname take over completely (also changing it to "Oppfinnar-Jocke" with 
an O, making it look even more informal, even verging on the playful or 
disrespectful). The fact that he once was called Johansson remained a 
trivia quiz item for nerdy Barks scholars like myself. It wasn't used in 
comics for many decades. Even now it's seen very rarely, sort of like an 
esoteric tribute to the old days (like in some Rosa stories about Gyro's 
heritage, for example). Whenever someone addresses the character formally, 
they say "Herr Oppfinnare" (Mr. Inventor).

That's about where we stand in this case. Maybe in the future, if some 
translator should happen to really use the name "Joakim Johansson" on some 
background diploma or something, we could make the author of Timo's quote 
look better... But in that case, he'd need to improve his serve.


Stefan Dios
Stockholm, Sweden