Nephews
Donald D. Markstein
ddmarkstein at cox.net
Thu Aug 3 21:04:24 CEST 2006
>Different character or not? Of course they are *supposed* to be
>exactly like one another, but if you look through several episodes
>where they do different things and you know which one does what, maybe
>you could find some unintentional (on the part of the writers)
>different character traits anyway?
>
>
An unknown number, probably dozens, of different writers, over a period
of decades, who don't even know each other, somehow managed to
coordinate their stories so that different character traits, amazingly
subtle and yet discernable to the studious reader, appear consistently
among the "different" nephews? And they did this without even intending to?
I don't think so.
I've been reading Duck stories with nephews in them for more than half a
century, and reading them seriously enough and repeatedly enough that I
could quote fairly large sections of Barks, and I've never seen any such
thing. What's more, until the 1980s, I never saw any consistency in the
way they were colored. But perhaps that's because I've never looked,
because as far as I've ever been able to tell, the three are absolutely
interchangeable.
Now, I can't claim to be one of the Master Planners of the Disney
Universe. In fact, most of my writing of Nephews is merely to re-dialog
European stories for American consumption -- at Egmont, where I write
full stories, I mostly do Mickey Mouse. However, even the minor Duck
work I do qualifies me to use the next paragraph's first five words as
an introduction.
SPEAKING AS A DUCK WRITER, I don't distinguish among them at all. If a
nephew speaks in one of the stories I work on, I attribute the balloon
to "Nephew". If two nephews speak in the same panel, I attribute the
ballons to "Nephew 1" and "Nephew 2", in normal reading order. I don't
recall all three nephews speaking in the same panel, but I'm sure you
can guess how I'd attribute the balloons if they ever did. In fact, even
if Phooey, the phantom fourth Nephew who is seen occasionally when
stories aren't proofread carefully enough, were to show up, I'd simply
call him "Nephew 4". (After pointing him out to editors, of course.)
Let someone else decide what color their caps are. Whatever he does,
he'll be consistent, because as far as I've ever seen, there is no
difference whatsoever from one nephew to another.
Didn't Don Rosa once do a story about what incredibly minute differences
you have to perceive to tell them apart? Differences like one of them
has a mosquito bite over his eye, or one has a couple of feathers out of
place? If any reader, anywhere, could see a real difference among them,
that was the time to share it with the rest of us.
Quack, Don
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